Rob Watson – Using AI as Your WordPress Coding Assistant

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION

AI is not going away. It’s here to stay, so we might as well use it as a tool for improving our WordPress websites. In this presentation, Rob will demonstrate the transformative role of artificial intelligence in WordPress development. You will see how AI can be a powerful coding assistant for small and large jobs. You’ll find out how it can streamline workflows and enhance productivity for developers of all skill levels. Rob will present various AI tools showcasing their capabilities in automating repetitive tasks, generating code snippets, and providing intelligent suggestions.

Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting, this presentation will equip you with the knowledge to leverage AI as a valuable ally in your WordPress coding journey. Join us to unlock new possibilities and elevate your WordPress projects to the next level with the help of AI.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Rob Watson is the founder and co-host of the West Orlando WordPress meetup group. Since 1996, he has been creating websites for businesses and organizations, small and large. In 2009, he founded Webidextrous.com as a freelance website design boutique. In 2015, he began to evolve it into a lean full-service web agency with a specialty in maintenance, security, and performance optimization of WordPress websites. Rob is also a space exploration enthusiast and the Executive Director of Innovation at The Inspired 24. He and his wife, Shannon, are parents to four children.

SUMMARY

The presentation began by highlighting the transformative role of artificial intelligence (AI) in WordPress development. The speaker, Rob Watson, discussed how AI has evolved much faster than anticipated, enabling natural language programming and the concept of “vibe coding.”

Vibe Coding with AI

Vibe coding refers to using natural language in a more intuitive and exploratory approach to programming and interacting with AI systems. This approach allows developers to harness the flexibility and adaptability of AI, enabling them to discover new functionalities or creative solutions without getting bogged down by rigid structures.

Debugging with AI Assistance

The speaker demonstrated how he uses AI tools, specifically Easy Peasy AI, to streamline the debugging process for WordPress sites. By providing the AI with details about the issue, it can quickly search the web, reason through the problem, and provide a solution, saving the developer significant time and effort.

Automating WordPress Development with AI

The presentation then explored how AI is transforming various aspects of WordPress development, including:

Content Creation

AI-assisted writing, editing, and content planning tools are becoming increasingly integrated into the WordPress ecosystem, helping developers and content creators optimize their workflows.

Low-Code/No-Code Development

AI-powered page builders and code generators are democratizing web development, allowing non-technical users to create sophisticated WordPress websites.

Theme and Front-end Development

AI-enhanced builders like Divi AI and Elementor are offering sophisticated code generation capabilities, automating tasks such as CSS and JavaScript implementation.

Backend and API Development

AI assistants can now generate optimized database queries, build custom REST API endpoints, and integrate WordPress with external services, following best practices and coding standards.

Automated Testing and Debugging

AI tools can generate unit tests, identify potential issues in WordPress code, and suggest fixes to maintain compatibility, as well as automatically generate comprehensive documentation.

The Future of AI in WordPress

The presentation concluded by emphasizing that these AI tools are becoming essential partners in the WordPress development process, handling repetitive tasks and generating boilerplate code while allowing developers to focus on more creative and strategic aspects. The speaker predicted that the integration of AI into the WordPress ecosystem will continue to evolve, further democratizing WordPress development and empowering both experienced and novice developers to push the boundaries of what’s possible within the platform.

TRANSCRIPT

[Music]

welcome everyone to the third Thursday meetup of the West Orlando WordPress Meetup Group I’m Rob Watson a co-organizer host and your presenter this evening West Orlando WordPress is an official WordPress Meetup Group affiliated with the WordPress Orlando and Word Camp US Meetup Groups AI is not going away It’s here to stay so we may as well use it as a tool for improving our WordPress websites In this presentation I will demonstrate the transformative role of artificial intelligence in WordPress development You will see how AI can serve as a powerful coding assistant for small and large jobs You’ll find out how it can be used in streamlining workflows and enhancing productivity for developers of all skill levels I’ll present various AI tools showcasing their capabilities in automating repetitive tasks generating code snippets and providing intelligent suggestions Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting this presentation will equip you with the knowledge to leverage AI as a valuable ally in your WordPress coding journey Learn to unlock new possibilities and elevate your WordPress projects to the next level with the help of AI My name is Rob Watson and I’m the founder and co-host of the West Orlando WordPress Meetup Group Since 1996 I have been creating websites for businesses and organizations small and large In 2009 I founded webex.com as a freelance website design boutique In 2015 I began to evolve it into a lean full-ervice web agency with a specialty in maintenance security and performance optimization of WordPress websites I am also a space exploration enthusiast and the executive director of innovation at theinspired24.com My wife Shannon and I are parents to four children At this point I’d like to invite everyone to mute their microphones and enjoy the presentation Awesome So today’s presentation is using AI as your WordPress coding assistant uh subtitled introduction to vibe coding So just as a little background when I was a uh young CS student I was constantly hearing about the promise someday of natural language programming with nth generation languages At some point I was told you could merely speak to the computer tell it what program you wanted and how it would work and it would generate that for you Given the state of programming and computers in the late 80s and early 90s I thought that would be at least a century away from happening And no computer or programming language I could imagine could have that much processing power memory and sophistication to pull that off AI has completely changed the game and a lot earlier than I ever imagined So what is AI well AI stands for artificial intelligence And today’s AI operates mainly via large language models So what’s a large language model a large language model LLM is a type of artificial intelligence designed to understand and generate human language It works by analyzing huge amounts of text data to learn patterns and grammar and context So when you input a prompt the model predicts the most likely next words based on what it has learned and allows uh it allows you to generate coherent and contextually relevant responses Essentially it uses statistical relationships in language to create text that resembles human writing All right So what is vibe coding so vibe coding is uh in the context of AI refers to uh using natural language in a more intuitive and exploratory approach to programming and interacting with AI systems So instead of strictly adhering to formal coding practices or extensive documentation developers might rely on their instincts and creativity when designing AI models or applications So for instance when using AI models the vibe coding practice can involve experimenting with different prompts tweaking parameters and iterating quickly based on the responses generated by the AI So this approach allows developers to harness the flexibility and adaptability of AI enabling them to discover new functionalities or creative solutions without getting bogged down by rigid structures So while vibe coding can lead to innovative outcomes and rapid prototyping it’s important to balance this approach with some level of discipline to ensure that the resulting AI applications are effective maintainable and aligned with best practices So I’d like to give you a demo of just some general debugging that I have been doing recently And these are real examples that I’ve actually used in the real world Um and I I’m using a suite called Easy Peasy AI to do the general debugging work Uh especially when sites break during a plug-in theme or core WordPress update Now I could do those things on my own It would take me more time Um and I I’m really a stickler for let’s use the least amount of time to get the most amount of work done Um so that’s kind of where AI plays in in in my brain Um just trying to get things done quicker All right So here’s an example where I was uh doing some maintenance on a website on a WordPress website and it was uh just updating plugins Now this site had been uh neglected for about 3 years So it had not had any updates since you know 3 years ago and it was on like uh WordPress 5.9 or 6.01 or something like that So there was a lot of technical debt that had piled up over the years And so I was meticulously going through and just doing one update at a time trying to see where it would break Um I got most of the way through it but then I got an error I got you know warnings on the screen and stuff like that And so I kind of decided well I don’t have time to sit here and try to figure it out on my own or use Google to kind of look everything up I’ve really got to get this done So I went into my favorite uh chat client which is called Easy Peasy AAI It’s easy-p.ai Um and this is a suite of um LLMs or learning large language models where I can select whatever reasoning model is going to uh fit whatever I need to do So there’s more than that here There’s all these models here So we have everything from chat GPT41 mini all the way up to deepsek R1 So there’s dozens of these in here that I can use and choose from But my favorite is to choose uh Claude uh Claude 3.7 Sonnet Okay because this one actually has um search and reasoning capabilities that I can turn on So I can select that Um and I can also it can also keep track of everything over time So if I do this query and I come back six months later it’s going to remember everything about what I did So here’s my query I just said in natural language a WordPress site is having trouble saving featured images on posts throughout the site We’ve tried the following And I list out all the things that we’ve tried And then I listed out um what the console log says and uh you know u oh actually this is a different let me just switch over to a different one here Sorry I thought I was on a different one Okay here it is So the attached functions.php file renamed functions 1.ext so I could upload it is generating the following warnings in WordPress And so I get this warning declaration of related sub items etc etc So I would normally have to just pick through all of these you know the this stack trace here and figure out where what’s what’s going wrong on where have a vague idea that it’s a functions.php file and something to do with um this plugin here Um but what I I just want to shortcut this So I enter all of this stuff in and out comes from the um LLM It searches the web looks for information does some reasoning and then it uh outputs this uh this this text here So I’m not going to go through all the details but basically it just told me here’s some code to add to the the advanced menu menu widget plugin Normally I wouldn’t do that because it’s a core code uh thing where you know if I change it it’s going to be forked and if I update it it’s going to change it back to what it was But in this case this plugin has been completely abandoned So there’s no chance really of it being ever um uh overwritten So I just went ahead and and updated the the code on the in the actual plugin because I know the developer is not going to change anything later So I just followed exactly what it told me to do Um and I got to this part and I didn’t recognize what this thing was So I just took it out I was like “Well that must be a a you know an error in the in the LLM’s thinking because what’s a dot dot dot doing there?” But as it turned out um that broke everything And I’m like “Well what happened?” Right so I asked I I now have this error and it says “Oh yeah Well you need to have the dot dot dot.” I’m like “Oh okay Well what is that dot dot dot?” So I can just literally ask it you know it says “Well this is variatic syntax Well what is that what does the dot dot dot do and it tells me everything I need to know about that So not only did I quickly solve the problem but I was also able to learn something I hadn’t known about before I won’t go into the details of variatic parameters It’s you know kind of trivial at this point but uh needless to say I got a lot of work done and I learned something very quickly So um win-winwin all around So all right So let me go back to that was that demo Let me just go back to everything here put this up here and we’ll go back to demo number two Right So this second demo is how I’ve how I’ve used Easy Peasy AI uh particularly with the Cloud 3.7 Sonnet LLM uh to completely transform how I write code by removing the boring and repetitive typing and coding language lookups It also does all the searching and reasoning that normally takes me hours and lets me get to the meaty parts of the design and functionality So now I’m going to use Easy Peasy to start a new chat And I’ve already got Claude selected I’ve got memory turned on I’ve got search and reasoning turned on Okay So now I’m going to give it a basic functionality prompt for what I want to do So my prompt which I’ve already pre-created here and I have tested this before the we’ll see how it turns out this time because I deleted my test and we’ll see what it does this time because sometimes it can change So readers of blogs and online articles appreciate knowing how much time an article will take before committing to it Write a WordPress plugin that automatically calculates and displays estimated reading time for posts with customizable reading speed settings Okay so I’m just going to use that as my prompt So here you can see it’s following a thinking process it’s actually reasoning um based on various rules that it has that it’s also and it’s database of things that it’s learned So while it’s doing that we can kind of start to preview what it’s going to do But in here in a second it’s going to refresh and it’s going to give me the full answer So it’s kind of thinking through everything right now So it’s generating all this code for me in real time And you can see the sources it’s using here at the bottom too We’ll stop scrolling So it’s actually going out on the web and searching up all the ideas that it can find about how to do this particular uh piece of coding And I can already tell this is a very different solution than the first one it did So uh maybe it’s remembering what I had asked it before because it has that memory and it’s thinking well maybe he didn’t like what he did before So I’m going to give give it give this a bit more sophistication So wow this is this is quite extensive It’s even doing a short code Wow that’s I didn’t tell it to do that So it also you know as it’s doing it searching it’s actually looking at other people’s code and saying “Oh here’s something that somebody else did that I should just add in here.” Now looking at all of this code that it’s generating it would take me probably days to really write all of this and you know seek out like all the syntax I can’t quite remember and um do all this out of my own head Uh plus all the debugging and all the frustrating hair pulling kind of stuff that happens when you’re when you’re coding All right so it has finished Um wow there’s a lot here Um so it gives me all the documentation that I need Um it gives me a short code you know for inserting it where I want to put it on the on the page Um quite a bit different than the first one I did I don’t know if I’m going to actually install this one because it may take more time than we have to actually show you what it’s doing Um but really it’s you know just copy the code here Let’s just see what happens Um so I’m going to pull up um my WordPress um directory here and I’m going to create a new file or new uh new folder Where’s the new folder new folder There we are And I’m going to call that folder that comes up Well there we are What is this called uh reading time estimator So we’ll call this reading time- estimator I’ll hit enter on that There’s my plug-in directory And then in there I will create a file with that same name.php Um so we’ll do rename it Oh wait I don’t need to do that Just paste that in there We’ll save it as reading time estimator.php And we’ll save that And hopefully that will work All right So now I’m going to bring in WordPress Studio here So WordPress Studio is like a local uh runtime for WordPress I’m going to stop it and restart it just to kind of resync everything So this is going to be running on my local machine So if I open the site it gives me you know this the site there If I open the WP admin and I go to plugins there’s the plugin that I just created So this is what it wrote for me It has the description and the version number and I can fill in this stuff later Um so I just click on activate Okay so now I have that And so now if I want to add that to a post let’s say to this one click on edit and then I go back to the instructions it gave me all the way at the bottom and place the reading time anywhere short code into the page Um you can also customize Let’s just use this customized one Let’s do that Then we’ll go back to our post Put that in there just to do it Let’s see if this works Ah doesn’t work Okay something’s I think it took the formatting in Let’s uh redo this Um let’s put that right there And we will do insert a block of code actually HTML custom html that’s where we put that in So we don’t want to display it as just that short code We want to actually have it interpreted Saving Saving Saving Why is it taking so long that’s interesting See if it’s already saved I may have crashed Let’s try to start and stop that again Oh goodness Okay here we go Boom All right updating failed We’ll just reload the site Oh it’s not going to let me log in that way Let me get back into studio That’s the thing about vibe coding is it just happens as it happens You just kind of go with it Oh gosh what’s going on here let me just restart um my entire studio here Quit We’ll do studio There we go All right Hopefully this time Come on I guess we have to force quit My apologies for the delay here All right maybe we just add a new site Let’s try that See what happens Okay that one’s running That one’s stopping I did not know what happened there All right so now I’m going to go and uh just open my Finder and add that uh plugin in there New Finder window and home directory studio Where are you studio I’m going to just bring that plugin Copy it Paste it into the one Oh not that WP content plugins paste item All right we’ll run that one now and see how that goes Uh WP admin There we go Plugins green time estimator start And now we will grab that short code and plop it into here edit and add the custom HTML and save If this crashes I give up Well while that’s going um I’ll show you another prompt that we can do Uh maybe that will recover itself Um so another prompt Let’s say I I’ve finished all of this and I’m like “Hey wait a minute What if I want to change the reading time?” So uh so instead of altering a constant in the plugins main file add a settings menu to the plugin in the dashboard And on the settings screen provide a form with a text box that contains the default words per minute that we assumed most readers have when the user enters a new value and clicks the save button it should save the new words permanent value to the database and use that value instead So our current plugin has that already hard-coded in there We want to make it so that it’s not hard-coded that we can actually you know change that setting to 300 words per minute or 10 words per minute uh depending on our audience So it does its whole thing again So that’s just a quick I’m going to kind of exit out of this because it looks like it’s not going to not going to finish right oh maybe this Okay let’s try this Um go back to the site here Edit post It’s still still not running Yeah for some reason some reason it’s just crashed So we’ll just leave that and I will do the rest of this demo with the assumption that we know what’s going on So these things happen Um let me jump back to the demo All right So play So the advantages there’s advantages and disadvantages as we’ve seen Uh things can crash Um but the basic LLM excuse me uh basic LLM chat interfaces have the advantage of being very quick to get working You don’t need to have an IDE You can just copy and paste everything in But the disadvantage is that you have a lot of scrolling back and forth you can the the LLM can kind of lose the plot and not and not remember what you’re trying to do and go off and like down rabbit holes and you’re just chasing your tail all the way through the the whole process Um that depends on the LLM Some of them are better than others at not doing that Um but it also doesn’t know the full context of all the code in your environment So it doesn’t know that you have other files in there It just knows that hey there’s a there’s a plugins directory and in that directory I put this but it doesn’t know anything else about your whole system you could have a completely you know bespoke version of WordPress and it wouldn’t know and it wouldn’t know how to deal with that So for that purpose uh we can use something called um an IDE Uh there’s a there’s one called Windinsurf Um it’s kind of a a Visual Studio Code IDE but it’s got AI capabilities Um and I’ve extended this using a product called Giga AI context manager It’s an extension that you install into the um into the IDE So the the extension’s job is to ensure that the LLM doesn’t lose the plot and get confused or distracted And so it helps the LLM to understand the full context of the codebase so that it knows the implications of various coding and design decisions for the whole architecture So this time I’m going to try to fly by the seat of my pants again and hope that uh my more complex demo concept works out the way I intend Again we are vibe coding here so uh every anything goes So let me get back into this Um so now I’m going to open up Windsurf So Windsurf is that IDE that I told you about Here it is Uh and I have um already here one that I’ve already made called the uh WP briefing dashboard widget And basically I just told it um you know to create a dashboard widget that um that will display the um uh a set of podcasts you know from a feed an RSS feed from uh from WordPress and you know just display it within the WordPress dashboard as a widget so that when I log into my dashboard in the morning and I’ve got my my drink and I’m ready to start working I can like consume a podcast if I feel like you know learning something new Um and so what it did is it says “Oh okay I I I see that you want a WordPress dashboard widget that displays the latest podcast episodes from the WordPress briefing podcast feed And I notice from your memory that we’ve already created a similar plugin So this is my second attempt Um so let me check what we have in the first before proceeding So it looked through everything that we had done before So it’s contextaware and it starts its thought process Let me check the general plugins directory to see what’s available So see here it has the actual it has all of the files that are in my WordPress um installation So it can see all of the stuff Um and so it searches the file system and it says “Okay I’ll create a new WordPress plugin that adds a dashboard widget to display the latest five episodes.” So it goes through and it says “All right let’s run this terminal command and let’s create uh a directory called plugins word uh WP briefing dashboard widget.” Now it says I’ll create the main plug-in file with the necessary code to fetch and display the WordPress briefing podcast feed in a dashboard widget Wow that’s pretty uh that’s pretty impressive Okay so it goes through and it does all that And you’ll notice here that I can actually open a diff and see the differences uh between the the different lines I’ve already committed this one so it’s all it’s all one thing Um I noticed that I referenced a logo image Let me close that diff there Can’t remember how to do that What was that okay So then it says I notic that I referenced a logo image in the code that I need to create for the widget So from the screenshot you provided I can see there’s a blue logo with W So it sees the the image and can describe it to you And it says okay well I’ll just include that image as part of the of the widget of the feed And then it just continues down It says I’m going to create the dashboard widget shows each episode with a title date file size description etc Play a new window link includes a sp the podcast header with a title description and logo So it basically just scrapes that off of the other website and allows users to customize the number of episodes displayed So it’s it’s going through all of this stuff and and at the very end it uh you know it generates the code which you see here So all of this code was generated in that one that one prompt So everything’s working there Um you’ll have I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it that it actually works because apparently this is not working anymore Um but yeah so that’s that’s how that works Um so if I wanted to I could start a whole new project and I could say well let’s see Let’s um let’s see Website owner Here’s one Okay So the first prompt that I’m going to do is um let me close this one Oops See all right So I’m going to start a new prompt I’m going to say “Website owners want a way to easily schedule and rotate content based on time parameters which is perfect for promotional campaigns seasonal content or time-sensitive information Write a WordPress plugin that will make a simple widget that displays different content based on time of day day of week or date range.” So I send that in Right now we’re watching it work in real time And I I haven’t run this one yet so I have no idea what’s about to happen but it’s kind of fun to watch So it’s it’s searching the file system to see what everything where everything is what’s going on and now it’s creating the widget Oh this is creating a widget not a plugin Interesting Well we’ll see what kind of widget it makes Maybe the widget is the control piece to make the content on the front end rotate But that’s that’s kind of the thing about vibe coding is like you you’ll put something in and it will interpret it a certain way and a lot of times it’s just gigo garbage in garbage out If you give it not enough information it will assume and start making the wrong thing and you can say “Oh actually what I meant was,” and you can correct it and it will undo what it did and do a new thing So oh there’s some files coming in here We have a time rotator widget right there Okay So it’s made a widget for the uh dashboard Uh allows you to display different content in a widget based on time of day date range etc etc All right Well um I’m actually going to say what I really wanted but forgot to mention is that I want this not to be a widget but to be a plugin that works on that handles content rotation on the front end Let’s see what it does It’s thinking So it’s now uh it’s now updating its context to say well what else do we have now we now it’s going to call it uh it’s going to look for plugins with a pattern content rotator Okay So it looks like it’s making a new plugin with a different name It’s analyzed what it’s already created Now it’s creating a short code So it may be using the widget and for the back end and a rotator short code for the front end Interesting So here I thought I would what I was describing was don’t do a widget do a plugin instead And it said “Oh hey I can use the widget and then I can just give you a short code to put on the front end.” And that may may or may not be what I want And I won’t put you through the whole you know agony of watching me test and run this whole thing I just want you to just see the general concept of what it’s doing here Uh so now it’s saying “Hey do you want to accept this code?” I’m going to say sure you know it’s brand new code Let’s just go ahead and accept it So now it’s created a new plug plugin called time rot rotator short code Allows you to display the different content on the front end of your site based on the time day of week uh or date range using a simple short code And so after you reactivate the plugin you can use the time rotator short code anywhere on your site And I can give it parameters Wow it it thought ahead here It actually gives me the ability to designate time and day um and all this kind of stuff right again this would have taken me hours to do um otherwise So maybe even days right so this is this is a really great example of what I can do And I can keep giving it new features you know give me an admin interface give me you know visual preview of the scheduled content all this kind of stuff So that’s what uh what I that’s the power of using an AI enabled IDE to do this work All right let’s go back to the presentation Okay so advantages and disadvantages Um and I got the wrong subtitle here but uh basically the IDE interface we have advantages are um it understands the full context so it knows everything about your project and you can do the code cleanup um and all the other kind of workflow tasks that that you need to do it’ll do it for you Um and it works really good with within teams So if you have a team of de developers and you have a git repository it works and blends really nicely with that The disadvantage is that it does require a bit more knowledge of how to use ideides for programming Um so if you don’t know how to do that you can actually ask an AI to tell teach you how to do it create a tutorial for yourself Um and you can it takes a little bit more time to set it up but once it’s set up it’s it’s good to go Um but it can lead to some overconfidence in the AI You always have to test You always have to do uh you know the normal process of of code development Um but you can actually ask the AI to write tests for you So if you want to test your forms to make sure that the inputs are sanitized and all this kind of stuff you can have it write tests u a test you know harness and have it just go through and do that for you So that’s also very nice All right so moving beyond the demo um I just want to talk a little bit more about the AI evolution uh in WordPress uh for this year and some of the trends and innovations that I’m seeing coming up on the horizon and that are already here Um so um AI tools for WordPress con uh content creation are becoming increasingly sophisticated and integrated into every platform’s ecosystem Everything is AI now Um so we have AI assisted writing and editing That’s something we’re getting used to now that’s pretty common Um it’s you know advanced AI writing assistance now directly integrated into WordPress editors like Yoast SEO and RankMath and a bunch of other you know different tools Um and uh you you have uh intelligent content planning which is really great Um these tools can now analyze audience behavior and search trends and uh suggest relevant blog topics There’s whole uh cottage industries sprouting up for SEO around using AI to analyze and write content for just in time needs Um and you can take care you can you can reduce content decay problems by detecting when your content is kind of stale um and you need to refresh it Um you can use smart tools to predict seasonal content opportunities before they peak So you know you if you forget Christmas is coming it’ll say “Hey do you want to do a Christmas thing?” Oh yeah sure Um uh multimedia content generation So you can you can do an AI image generation which is very common today It’s getting hard to tell what’s real and what’s not Uh but you can do it directly within WordPress right in the page builder Um you can also do automated video transcript creation for improved accessibility and SEO and you can do intelligent alt text and caption generation for better image optimization So those are all options Um for programming like we were just experiencing we have low code or no code expansion which is AI powered page builders allowing non-technical users to create sophisticated WordPress websites Um the uh there’s WordPress block editor and site editor becoming more AI enhanced Um you have the democratization of web development through all of this AI assistance Um for WordPress specific AI code generators like codewp.ai um has which has become a leading specialized AI tool for WordPress developers It’s trained specifically on WordPress code bases and it generates PHP JavaScript and plug-in functionality from natural language prompts just like we saw Um that platform also now supports popular plugins like Gutenberg Elementor Woo Commerce and ACF and with dedicated modes that understand the unique architecture of each one and then you have complete plug-in c uh creation system So there are services like wpautoplugin.com that have emerged and as you know solutions that can generate entire WordPress plugins So you don’t even need to do all the stuff I was doing You just go and sign up subscribe to wpautoplugin.com tell it what plugin you want and it will guide you through the whole process eliminating unnecessary bloat and addressing all of the specific functionality needs that you have Um and these tools now understand WordPress hooks filters standard plug-in architecture producing compliant secure code that follows WordPress coding standards So next we have theme and front-end development So we have AI enhanced builders like Divi AI and Elementor uh they’ve both evolved beyond content creation to offer sophisticated code generation capabilities directly in the interface So you can just develop your website design it generate images generate text all that stuff right inside of the page builder It’s really convenient Um the code module now supports complex custom code generation including animations dynamic content loading and interactive elements without leaving the builder Gone are the days of going to Fiverr and saying “Hey can you help me write the CSS for something?” You just ask the builder to do it Um so theme customization tools AI tools now help developers quickly implement child theme modifications by generating the exact code needed to overwrite uh parent theme functionality So that’s really really helpful These tools analyze parent themes and uh suggest optimal approaches for customization without breaking any updates And then we have CSS and front-end solutions So advanced AI systems can now translate design requests into complex CSS and JavaScript solutions that work correctly across the WordPress ecosystem I’ve actually done this with buttons on a website where I’m just I’m in a hurry I I say here’s a screenshot of a button and this is the style I want for a new button Can you just generate the CSS for it and it gets 90% of the way there I just have to adjust padding and margin So it’s really really cool Um so yeah there’s that And then let’s see let’s move on to the next one So backend and API development So we have WordPress database interaction These tools now generate optimized database queries specific to WordPress’s unique unique structure And then SQL AI has added WordPress specific modules that understand custom post types taxonomies and metadata relationships Um we also have REST API development where the AI assistants now help developers build custom endpoints for the WordPress REST API with proper authentication and data handling Boy that’s that’s just that’s weeks of work work that you can just get done almost immediately Um generated codes include um security best practices and follows WordPress API conventions So it knows what WordPress likes And then finally we have integration with external services um tools that can now generate code for integrating WordPress with thirdparty APIs and services like Zapier or monday.com and a AI systems understand WordPress’s transient API and caching mechanisms to optim optimize external connections Whatever is in the WordPress codecs it can do because it knows all of that stuff Last slide Um automated testing and debugging This is really really cool I mentioned that earlier where AI tools can now just generate your unit tests for you specifically for all of your functions and plugins to make sure that the right data is getting in in and out of your plugins and your functions Um they can identify potential issues in WordPress code and suggest fixes that maintain compatibility Um you can also do document generation So um these assistants can now generate uh comprehensive documentation for plugins and themes I’ve done that for my clients where when I’m done doing whatever I’m doing I say now generate some documentation on how this works and I just send it to them It’s really great Um and then WordPress specific learning assistants uh are AI systems that now provide contextual learning resources for WordPress developers Um they explain WordPress specific concepts and provide implementation examples that follow best practices So you can actually create a tutorial for yourself that’s AIdriven and you can tell it I’m a very very new beginner on this topic help me understand it and walk me through it until I’m at PhD level and it will just do that for you Um and finally code review and improvement So if you have code that you want to have reviewed normally in the past we would have a pair programmer come in and look at look at your code and say “Well you did this wrong you did that wrong you should you know tighten this up.” AI can do that for you So we don’t have to spend a lot of time just digging through code to see if we did it right It just says “Okay if you trust me this is how you should do it.” And you should always check it but most of the time it’s right So in conclusion all uh these AI tools are fundamentally changing WordPress development by making programming more accessible to non-developers and helping experienced developers work more efficiently rather than replacing WordPress developers These tools are becoming essential partners in the development process and handling repetitive tasks and generating boilerplate code while allowing developers to focus on more creative and strategic aspects The next year we will see these tools become more deeply integrated into the WordPress ecosystem with a greater understanding of the unique architecture and conventions This evolution will continue to democ democratize WordPress development allowing more people to create custom solutions without extensive programming knowledge while also helping experienced developers push the boundaries of what’s possible within the platform

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