WordPress Launches AI Site Builder Amid Company Restructuring (theverge.com) 24
WordPress.com has released an AI-powered site builder in early access that constructs complete websites with generated text, layouts, and images. The tool operates through a chatbot interface where users input specifications, resulting in a fully formed site that can be further refined through additional prompts.
While WordPress.com claims the builder creates "beautiful, functional websites in minutes," it currently cannot handle ecommerce sites or complex integrations. Users need a WordPress.com account for the free trial, but publishing requires a hosting plan starting at $18 monthly (less with annual subscriptions). The builder only works with new WordPress instances, not existing sites.
This launch comes as parent company Automattic recently cut 16% of its workforce and faces a lawsuit from hosting company WP Engine, which offers competing site-building tools.
While WordPress.com claims the builder creates "beautiful, functional websites in minutes," it currently cannot handle ecommerce sites or complex integrations. Users need a WordPress.com account for the free trial, but publishing requires a hosting plan starting at $18 monthly (less with annual subscriptions). The builder only works with new WordPress instances, not existing sites.
This launch comes as parent company Automattic recently cut 16% of its workforce and faces a lawsuit from hosting company WP Engine, which offers competing site-building tools.
Shitty company has shitty AI (Score:2)
Please clap.
Means two things (Score:2)
Also, he realized he missed the boat on a crypto miner
The software scam space is tough, and he's used to being a big name in a small, more honest market. He's going to have to up his game to play in AI land and whatever comes next after mechanized glossolalia stops selling new hardware.
AI slop means less vanity web sites to profit from (Score:2)
Expecting AI slop to help bloggers demonetize their own blogs and reduce the number of original content blogs to make them unreadable.
Wordpress is terrible, let's add AI to it. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm guessing this is template manipulation based on prompt input? Wordpress itself is kinda a mess, I can't think adding AI to that is gonna help at all. More power to all the marketing execs obsessed with this colossal stain on the web though. It'll help them build shinnies by skipping their IT staff altogether. Which'll be fun to sort out when they come to IT to sort out the disaster later.
Re: (Score:3)
WordPress isn't just "kinda a mess", it is a 20 year old master class in poor application design and writing terrible PHP.
It is only a matter of time before their "AI" forgets to enable all the security plugins make WP sites seem secure for more than 45 minutes.
Re: (Score:2)
Wordpress is the premier platform for SEO spam and affiliate marketing (which also needs SEO spam). That's why virtually 100% of the plugins are marketing-related these days, rather than neat tools to make your blog more useful to use as a blogger who just wants to share their thoughts with the world. SEO spam is actually where generative AI saw its first major success. Wordpress the company is actually late to the game on this, like literally muliptle years late. They're almost certainly going to nuke the
Re: (Score:2)
Wordpress is the premier platform for SEO spam and affiliate marketing (which also needs SEO spam). That's why virtually 100% of the plugins are marketing-related these days, rather than neat tools to make your blog more useful to use as a blogger who just wants to share their thoughts with the world. SEO spam is actually where generative AI saw its first major success. Wordpress the company is actually late to the game on this, like literally muliptle years late. They're almost certainly going to nuke the plugin marketplace to make this work.
SEO is disgusting as it is currently used, and Wordpress does everything it can to make it more disgusting. SEO is where information goes to die, but buried, then glossed over with massive piles of words that mean absolutely nothing. Come to think of it, so is Wordpress.
Re: (Score:2)
By itself Wordpress isn't terrible, the huge mashup of plugins and themes many people install on top of it transform it in a terrible mess.
Re: (Score:2)
By itself Wordpress isn't terrible, the huge mashup of plugins and themes many people install on top of it transform it in a terrible mess.
I'll disagree outright. Wordpress is terrible on its own, granted, it's baseline terrible. It's a completely new dimension of terrible with the massive pile of plugins that most people throw on it.
Let me see (Score:3)
Disclaimer: It's not a major part of my job, but I do manage a couple web servers that run Wordpress.
So let me get this straight... the developer of a software platform with a history of significant security flaws is using "AI" - which itself is widely seen as producing buggy, exploitable code - to create an automated website builder?
Nah, I can't see any way this could go south.
Re: (Score:2)
AI isn't really defined here, so there could be no code involved. Indeed, there could be no LLM involved either. But chances are it's just basically something that you give user friendly prompts to and it outputs some CSS and an initial page structure given Wordpress.com is primarily about building blogs or other types of website that's mostly static pages.
The web is cooked (Score:2)
Get a freakin hobby, I recommend learning guitar, it's easy to learn, is good for your brain and emotional life, and can be awesome in the h
Garbage Platform (Score:2)
Stop using shitty WordPress. It's shit for a CMS. It's shit for blogs. It's shit for SEO. It basically has zero redeeming features. No one is forcing you to keep using it.
Re: (Score:2)
Stop using shitty WordPress. It's shit for a CMS. It's shit for blogs. It's shit for SEO. It basically has zero redeeming features. No one is forcing you to keep using it.
It has one redeeming characteristic, in that when all you need is something simple, it can just work.
Re: (Score:2)
It has one redeeming characteristic, in that when all you need is something simple, it can just work.
The same as most other major CMS/blog software. Wordpress is not unique in this aspect.
Do not use Wordpress.
Re: (Score:2)
WordPress is *not* more shitty tan Drupal or Joomla.
Re: (Score:2)
It absolutely is. Drupal and Joomla are more complicated and more powerful. WordPress is neither because it is the absolute shittiest of all major name CMSs.
Actually need an e-commerce site .... (Score:2)
I've been looking at my options for a while now, because all I really want is something basic to showcase my 3D printed items and asking prices for them. The fact this AI can't even handle e-commerce sites makes it a total non-starter for me, even putting security concerns and the rest of it aside.
The unfortunate thing I've seen with doing an e-commerce site is, most places assume you actually make decent money with one so they expect to get their cut by way of monthly fees and "unlocking" features at extra
Re: (Score:2)
WordPress with WooCommerce is actually a pretty good solution for someone with next to no budget.
Get a cheap wordpress compatible hosting account. (siteground, wp engine, etc)
Install a free theme like Botega (https://wordpress.org/themes/botiga/)
Get a free stripe account.
As a sub $100k annual seller, you don't have to worry about any complicated sales tax policies. Usually just your local rate for people in your state.
Add your products in woocommerce.
Blog about what you're doing. You could write a dozen pos
Re: (Score:2)
Appreciate this advice.... and sounds like what I was piecing together on my own when doing some research.
But .... am I the only one who had some issues with Stripe? I tried to set up a free account on it not long ago, and it kept recognizing me as a previous user with 2 existing accounts in their system. One was for DoorDash because they use Stripe, at least to generate your annual tax paperwork. And the other was, I think, from back when I set up a Quora account so I could monetize it. (Never did get pa
WordPress bashing in 3,2,1 ... (Score:5, Insightful)
WordPress and its predecessor b2cafelog arguably were built by people who couldn't program all to well. And the codebase certainly shows that until this very day. However, in the decades that I've been using WP and it's predecessors I have come to discover that many things that look like a bad joke in code form come with unintuitive key advantages that have secured WPs position as the worlds leading CMS for good reasons.
Here's a list of those key advantages to WordPress, that still make it the premium option for CMSes today:
1.) Everythings procedural. And yes, that's an advantage(!), for multiple reasons:
-- Even the most clueless of progging n00bs will _instantly_ notice when he breaks something, because then the whole thing crashes into a white screen of death (or todays equivalent).
-- The memory requirements for WP are quite modest, even today. That enables the thing to "run" in thousands of instances with modest HW requirements.
2.) WP does templating right. Because is doesn't use some inner platform templating bullshit like every other system does, it uses pure PHP. WordPress is the only notable project that is aware that PHP is at first and foremost a templating language in itself. A rare thing in the PHP world, where each and every project has to reinvent the wheel and make their thing unmanageable in the process.
Child templates are another instance of templating done right.
3.) WPs data model is a mess. But it doesn't care. And that's good. Because the systems that _do_ care always turn out to have way _worse_ models. As shitty as WPs model and god-object wp_post is, anyone can grasp it in 20 minutes or less. The advantage being, that I can program around any nutty WP nonsense within an hour, build exactly what I want and need and nothing more. Every other PHP CMS forces it's bullshit on to me and I have to spend days wading through inner-platform documentations to get anything done. Sickening. Drupal/Symfony being a good example of this problem.
All datamodels turn into a dumpster-fire if their aren't meticulously managed. Which they very rarely are. With WordPress I at least know _exactly_ what type of dumpster fire I'm getting and have the tools at hand to put it out and/or get it under control and turn it into my very own special type of dumpster fire.
4.) Hardwired URLs turn out to be a good thing too. You can't migrate domains or hosts without asking the person in charge, because he needs to run his special SQL & SED scripts. That has saved me countless headaches in the last 2 decades and has prevented many a team of taking the CMS and causing damage without being aware of it.
5.) WP uses PHP. 3000 projects on one host, 0% cpu load. We don't care how shitty your code is, we'll kill it at server-timeout anyway. Stateless server-side templating. You can have all the state you want until timeout. Then we'll just wipe it. Awesome. No pathetic Node babysitting like with some 90ies Java Enterprise behemoth. Soooo much piece of mind.
6.) UI doesn't have users fall into an instant panic attack. A monkey with a learning disability can handle WPs Dashboard within 5 minutes. I can't stress enough how valuable this is.
Bottom line: Many things in WP that look like the worst thing ever turn out to be very useful and advantageous. And make WP notably superior to other setups that try to be smart but fall on their face in the real world. You'd be surprised.
Re: (Score:2)
I would argue that storing absolute URLs thousands of times in the WordPress site database is incredibly annoying when you can pick up the top-level URL via a $_SERVER[] variable (or just have it hard-coded once in the DB and append relative URLs to it for sub-pages). Anyone doing serious WP development has dev/staging/live environments and will often want to copy a full site between any combination of those environments - cue painful search-replace of all the URLs (sadly WP-CLI's "wp search-replace" only d