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Michael Kallister, a WordPress expert, discusses his background in the WordPress industry. He started with website design and then transitioned to creating WordPress themes. He focused on clean and native themes without excessive functionality. He found success by differentiating himself through his design skills. He now sees full-site editing as a game-changer and is building his new project, OliWP, alongside it. He believes that WordPress already provides most of the tools needed to build a website, so he focuses on design rather than creating a page builder. He targets both users building websites for others and less technical users building websites for themselves. Michael Kallister, thank you for joining me. Welcome. Thank you so much. Awesome. Happy to be here. I thought we know each other, but I thought it'd be helpful. Maybe if you could give like your like brief background and bio, cause you're actually kind of like WordPress, you know, royalty at this point or legacy. Yeah, I am. I am tech debt. I'm WordPress tech debt at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Thanks. Yeah. I have been around WordPress a long time. I don't even know how long. At least 15 years and I've been making products in the space for a good amount of that time. I started doing like websites, like everyone else. And then I was like, Oh, there's this cool thing, WordPress. I can build on instead of like stats. They just started using that. And then shortly after that, the kind of theme space blew up. And that was like right up my alley because I was, you know, I'm traditionally a designer. That's kind of my trade has been forever since high school, you know? So I, you know, I love design. I love designing websites and all kinds of other things. And so when WordPress came along, I was like, Whoa, I can use this as a vehicle to distribute my design to a lot of people, instead of like one client at a time, I could put my designs into these templates and they can go everywhere. So at the time, you know, things like theme forest and all these like theme marketplaces were like crazy. So I was on team force for a long time. And then they had a, I don't know if you were around back then, but. They had a bunch of weird pricing changes and inclusivity and all this stuff and license problems. And so I had, at that point I had enough success to be like, I'm going to go solo and go launch my own site. And I launched at the time it was called okay. Themes. Okay. A Y okay. Thanks. Not good. Not great. Just okay. And that was good. Yeah. I did that for several years and rebranded to array themes, which probably more people know. And at that point I was independent and also on wordpress.com and some other things like that. And then in 2018, I sold that and the atomic blocks plugin that I was making at the time to WP engine for a while. And now I'm building OliWP. I'm back, baby. Themes cannot keep me away. I have wanted something like full-site editing so long. I've built things for so long that I was like, we need something like this. And finally it's here and I'm building alongside of it. So that's my story. And you in brief. You've kind of lived like the agency freelance developers dream, which is I keep getting paid to build one website at a time and something that runs on, you know, that 10,000 people will pay me for or whatever, you know, like that's definitely the dream. So I'm, I'm impressed that you made that transition and you were, you were early, I think the first time. Right. So you're early in time. Yep. I was early enough anyway to, to, you know, I think a lot of people were doing stuff back then, but I think my, probably my design style and my design skills put me kind of in a unique place and it's, I've always maintained that because I always push my design. I always like check and I keep getting better at it and in WordPress, which you probably know, and a lot of people like there is not a ton of great design going on. I mean, that's not to discredit the many people who are doing some, some cool stuff, but that's never been the like bread and butter. Nobody's ever looking at WordPress as an industry and being like, you know what they have, great design. So just having good design myself, I'm able to at least differentiate myself enough to be competitive in this huge market. Yeah. I mean, I run Ollie on my personal site because I'm not a designer and I don't really, like I've learned that the hard way of like promising design sorts of things early in my career. And I'm just not good at it, but we all, you know, you started WordPress, you're like, I can do everything. But I do, that's actually interesting because I think like back to that old theme day, like where people were selling things and like a lot of times themes were like a ton of functionality. So it was like, we have a grid builder and a slider and a blah, blah, blah. And it was all of that sort of stuff. And you differentiated on like design specifically. Did you still have to put in like all that functionality back then? All those little add-ons, what did you do for that stuff? No, I was such a pain in the ass and that I refused to do any of that. They were the, like the, the most in the same way that Ollie is just like entirely native back then. It was like the themes that I was making were just entirely clean and native. They didn't do a bunch of stuff. They just looked good. And then if you wanted to plug your own stuff into it, that was awesome. But I just tried to keep them as simple as possible because again, back then and still through now, I'm like very small operation. I was only a one man operation forever until I did my, with did Ollie and I have a co-founder Patrick with that. So, you know, back then it was like, even though I was doing some big numbers, it was like, I was the only one doing support and building these things. So the more you add onto a theme, the more functionality you put in, the more sliders you add, it's just their, their support nightmares and headaches and everything else. So yeah, back then it was just bare. The ethos was very similar to this. Now it's like super clean and to core meth pretty much is. Okay. Cause I was also thinking like that was what people paid for also a little bit. You know, sometimes people bought these themes because they wanted all that functionality and now full set editing has a lot of the, I mean, it's even just the block editor just has like 90% of the fancy things you need for mostly out. So like, you're not providing that you really are now just providing design and nothing else. I don't know. Do you see like other, like, do you see like cadence and those sorts of like block-based like theme builders as like competitors or like in your same zone or are those different tools or how do you see those? I guess they are. I have always, you know, like I've said, I've kind of always just done my own thing, even in the era of the mega page builders and the mega themes and all that stuff, I had enough of an audience on the side in my own little pocket to do my own thing and not think about those ever. It just was like, no, I'm the guy you come to if you want the other stuff and there's enough people in WordPress where you can do that and niche down and find your pocket. And so I kind of missed the cadence and everything revolution. And when full set editing came, I just went straight to that. And I was like, no, I can build into this. I know the model works from my old theme days that there was enough people that want, that don't want those kinds of things. And as you know, there's like, there's so many different personas in WordPress. Like there's a builder persona that wants and needs that kind of tool. You can sit in and generate blocks and that stuff because they're generating things, but then there's like hundreds of thousands of people a day installing WordPress themselves, and they're looking at full site editing, pure full site editing and the block editor and a block theme, and they don't know anything about cadence or generate blocks or anything like that. So they're looking at the, the kind of system that I have decided to buy into and build alongside and build for. So that's kind of where I'm at. I'm like, and again, I think, especially as a small operation, if WordPress now has almost all the tools you need to build out a decent website built into WordPress and all the design tooling and everything, I'm, I'm investing there. I I'm almost 40 years old. I don't have the time or the energy. I have a one-year-old at home. Like I'm not building a page builder. I'm like, I'm not doing that. WordPress has done it. And there's some shortcomings for sure, but it's like, even if it's 75, 80% there, that's amazing, that's like the 75, 80% I don't have to build and the rest we can polish and fix up. So yeah, that's where I'm at. Yeah. That's how I feel sometimes when I look at these tools, like obviously I understand the value of them. I never worked in a place where we use a lot of page builders. So to see like cadence and generate, which are basically page builders inside of Gutenberg where you can tweak every single like margin spacing at every break point, all these sorts of things, sometimes like I'm the kind of person where like on my site, if it's like, I like small, medium and large spacing and I really don't care, like I don't need to get that granular. Like that's good enough for me. I think it like solves my problems. So I'm like probably the perfect use case where I'm like, I know if I needed to, I could write some CSS and I could do all this sort of stuff, but I kind of like the simplicity that you're going to have where it's like, no, there's just like four spacing sizes and I don't care that they're going to be responsive enough, like I don't want all the bells and whistles. So, I mean, I guess I'm sort of weirdly your target audience, even though I technically know how to do all those things, but like he's your audience. Like, do you think they're more like building websites for other people? Or do you get a lot more like building websites for themselves? Less technical kind of users. It's a blend for sure. Which, you know, in launching Oli and Oli Pro, we, you know, we weren't sure who we were going to get, because this is like a whole new era of WordPress. And there's a lot of people who, you know, at least if you, you know, read the tea leaves on the internet, which you should never do, there's just so much complaint and this, this and that or whatever, but then we launched it and we're like, oh, okay. So tons of people are ready to use it. Different kinds of personas from like, you know, like teachers building sites for the classrooms. And then the really surprising thing was we launched with two pricing plans and we were immediately met with a bunch of questions from like agency folks who were like, oh, we need, we need more installs, more activations. And that was very surprising because, you know, everything we learned about, I learned about agencies working at WP Engine was like, they don't love change. It's expensive, time consuming and adding new tools. It's, it's a lot of work, but no, they were. Many of them were like ready. And like, I think for them, you can see the value. It's like, okay, well we can get rid of the dependency of a lot of these tools. Maybe just build our own thing around the 75% that's there. And so we actually have a very like even distribution of, of sales across our different plans and in support, I see all kinds of personas. So, you know, it's kind of great in a way to have a diversity of personas. It's also as a product person and a, you know, trying to dial in a product, that's like the worst thing ever. You want, you know, like a hero customer that you're building for. But I think also it does make sense with OliPro because we're just providing, it's like a design library and that's, that's, it's not like a pro tool for builders, it's, it's designed for people like you, it's designed for the lady who's building a website for a classroom or whatever. So it's just design and design is like fairly universal as a, as a tool. So I think that makes sense. Yeah. And I like, it was like in my agency experience, we didn't use a lot of page builders, we also didn't use a lot of, like, we always hated when a client came with a stock theme and then like, oh, can you make this like theme for a theme do XYZ and it's like, you knew it was going to be more work to do that than to build it yourself. But I also think we used like, we often had a very specific design. So for us, it was like, all right, we need to make this match this exact design. Whereas like that situation where you're like, I don't, I'm not trying to match a design. I just want to, I just want it to look good. I want it to look like somebody designed it, even though nobody designed it for like design my specific website. So that makes sense. Like, yeah. I also, you know, you were saying like, it's hard to maintain like a huge library of like gadgets and gizmos inside your theme. And I feel like we are seeing that a little bit with like the block editor where it's like, they just have so many cool things, but all of them need like a month focus of like, they need like a team of developers on each one, like finishing them or something like that. Yeah. It's a finish. Now you've shifted the burden of that to where like, like whatever, your fate is really tied to the block editor's like ability to deliver. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like, you know, small teams and indie product makers, they move fast as hell because there's no limitations. They just ship the thing they want to ship. They build it, they ship it, but like it's awesome to have it all in core, but then you're at the kind of the way things ebb and flow in core, which there's a lot going on and there's priorities. And the, sometimes the most important thing to you is the last thing on people's list. So, you know, it's, it's tough, but you're right. It's, it's so powerful and there's so much stuff in there, but like, like many people have said, like one whole cycle of just like fit and finish would really like do a lot for, for people. Yeah. Do you, are there like specific, well, actually I don't want to back up. When you design, so you're going to design a new set of patterns. Cause you have, what do you call like the, the, the pattern, like the, the themes of patterns that you have? Collections. Collections, you know, like creator and what are the other startup and a studio. Okay. And when you go in and you're like, all right, say I'm going to make a new one or I'm going to add on those. Do you start in the editor or do you start in like Figma or something? Yeah, I do everything in Figma first because I provide the Figma files as well. So a lot of people love that because they love to be able to get in there and take the patterns and do what they want with them. And I'm also, you know, I've done the design of the browser era of my life. And I just find that I do much more interesting design in Figma cause I can move quick. I can iterate. I can do, when you're doing it in the editor, you're, you're kind of boxed in already, so you're designing inside a box, inside a box, and so you're designing within constraints. I would rather design it in Figma, knowing everything I know about WordPress and the constraints therein, I'll design it there with that in mind and have the freeform nature of Figma, get the design done. And then when I go to put it in WordPress, I have the design done, the colors picked out, typography is all scaled out. I have the sample content for all the patterns is already in there. It just saves me a ton of time to start in Figma and work for us. Do you ever make a design in Figma and you're like, I don't know that I can do this in the block editor. And not only that, like it's one thing to make a design in the block editor. It's another thing where you're making a design, but it has to still be editable by other people in the block editor in an intuitive way, you can't just like, Oh, I just put classes on everything. And I have a bunch of CSS over here that you can't over, like you kind of can't do that as much. Do you ever get to a place where you're like, I thought I could do this and I can't, or is it usually doable? Just like, just sometimes I usually design it confidently knowing it can be done. Like I said, I've, I've made hundreds of patterns at this point with all native core coordinated blocks. So I very much know what can and can't be done. There'll be things when I'm in, like, I'm in the, in the mode, looking at the matrix code falling in Figma. And I'm like, Oh, that'd be cool. So I could do this. And so I'll, I'll design it out. And then it actually, I'm working on a new pattern collection right now. And there's a thing in there that I've included that I'm not sure if it will work or not. Like you said, you can do a lot in there, but is it intuitive for somebody to go in there and change it? That's the other thing. It's like, has to be changeable easily. So generally speaking, I design it with all of that in mind so that I don't paint myself in a corner. And again, I'm all about like, I got to move quick and efficiently. And I, I think people, if you were to look at the Figma files that I'm designing, never think that these were designed with constraints of a content editor in mind. I think that's the trick. That's the kind of the value that the OLLI designs kind of provide. It's like, they look great and they're designed super well. And when they hit the page, they look awesome. And they tie entirely into all of the tooling in WordPress. They're not constrained by anything. So, yeah, it's, it's taken many, many years of doing themes to know how to do that. And yeah, that's where we're at. And it's interesting, like you're talking about building patterns. Cause like, I feel like patterns have become so important in WordPress and in Gutenberg where you can tell that maybe they were surprised by that. Like, I feel like they didn't realize that that was going to be such an important, like central feature that like everything else is based on and they're kind of catching up to it. But I don't know, to me, it feels like patterns are like the central game changing feature that really for most of the like unlocks, like, Oh, okay. Now I get why people would want to use this block editor to begin with. Oh yeah. I mean, there patterns are kind of a universal thing across these site editors now everywhere. They're kind of pre-designed content. And before we had patterns in WordPress, back when I was working at WP Engine, my coworker, John Paris and I years before, like this was shortly after the block editor came out and there was like not great tooling. We built a prototype of patterns and it was called, we call them sections and layouts, it was just like section page, page sections, and then full page layouts. And they ended up using that when patterns came around, they used that as the, like the prototype. They had our screenshots of our thing and the, and the big pattern kind of ticket, and it was like, cool. We kind of like pseudo invented patterns, you know, not that they wouldn't have gotten there because it's just an obvious use case for the site editor that they had to get to patterns some way, somehow. But yeah, I, I, I saw enough value to be like, yeah, I'm building the whole business around that. Olly is just, it's patterns, it's a pattern library and styles and typography, all that stuff, but it's all delivered through, through patterns. Yeah. And like, it feels like the next big thing to me, at least I think it was going to be the sort of like cloud pattern libraries or ways to like, and there's this cool thing with the block editor where you can take a pattern from one of yours, like, like the creator pack in Olly, that's very designed very differently, but as soon as I pop it into my site, which already has all my brand colors, everything like that, suddenly it looks exactly like the rest of my site and it would, you know, it's like the way that they're super composable and you can like move them back and forth. And it feels like, like that concept of pattern management, cloud pattern libraries, and the thing that Olly has that I honestly, once I was using this, I was like, how is this not a thing in core, but you have the, you have a custom, it's basically a custom block where if I'm working, I can start typing the word pattern and then all these like pattern library opens up and I can pop a pattern right there. And the idea that in core, you actually can't, there's no keyboard shortcut to just get the patterns, you have to like click three different, like mouse clicks to get the pattern. But you just have this like, literally like I'm just typing, I can type in slash pad and like Olly pattern manager opens up, I can dig through all the patterns, but like this whole idea of like, I can pull in patterns from everywhere, patterns will be shared. Patterns will be probably across multiple sites so that I could build it on my seeding site and then pull the pattern in on my live site or something like that. I mean, is that where you think Olly's going to go? Or like how these tools in WordPress would go? Yeah, we, so from the very beginning of this, before I had even linked up with Patrick Posner, I had kind of started prototyping out what I thought a cool new WordPress company could be around, around this stuff. And when we met, we just kind of shared notes. We had like the same exact notes, which was awesome. That's what you want, somebody who's going to partner with you. But from the very beginning, we had this idea that there was going to be two way patterns libraries. So users can download patterns from our cloud, which is currently what you can do. But the idea was that you would be able to create your own patterns and push them up to the cloud. And then you log into your other site. Maybe you create your own set of patterns that you love to start with. You log into a different site, you pull those in and you can continue to customize them. We've seen a few companies doing this now. I think Cadence maybe does it in their own way. We're, we've actually built out the interface for it already. That's what we use to publish patterns to the cloud. So it already kind of works in that way. We're just waiting for a few more things on our end and from core to feel like we want to like, cause once you push something out out there like that, that's kind of a big deal. Pulling patterns to your site is not a huge deal, but pushing them up is like a whole different ball game and we want to make sure that we're ready to do that. But yeah, I think that's the idea. And this, again, this is not some kind of secret sauce or anything. Our differentiation will be in how we pull it off and how intuitive it is. And you know, all the, all of that stuff. But I think other companies will follow suit in a way because the model kind of just works for patterns as a sort of consumable parts of your site, like you said, and especially now patterns are getting even more powerful with sync patterns and that's not the end of it. We're going to see more, more kind of intelligent things around patterns and typography and stuff. What kills me is like people look at WordPress like it is now and they're complaining as if in five years from now, this shit isn't going to be awesome and do all the stuff that we can't even imagine. It's that's where I have always pointed to and said, like, we're building for now and two years from now and two years from then and from then and just banking on the idea that this thing gets better with my help and your help and everyone's help. So, yeah. Yeah. I keep looking at like the most upcoming release and really 2024 as a whole and like what was WordPress trying to accomplish with 2024? Like what were the things that were clearly priorities? Because there's, it's definitely was a year of, I was hoping for a year of clean up the UI, but it was definitely a year of building under the hood APIs like block bindings and things like that. And you see little bits of it, like in like synced patterns, which is like a user facing feature. But under the hood, like this next release, there will be no physical changes to synced patterns, but the API underneath it is like, has like moved another like hundred yards. Like it's, it's definitely improved a lot, but it's not user facing it. And that's kind of the theme of this whole year is like WordPress has done a lot of stuff under the hood that I think is not as exciting or visible or usable yet. But like, you can see, okay, let's be realistic. It's a couple of years away, but like it's getting there and it's like the things are there. And I think patterns, pattern development, all that sort of stuff is a priority. I don't think design controls to the level people want are going to be as much of a priority, but I don't, you know, I don't know, are you, do you have an opinion on responsive design controls? I mean, I think the, it's so tough because there are parts of the old way of building websites that I'm totally over. I don't need to actually, you know, I've built websites every different way you could possibly do it. And there is something refreshing about leaning on, like you were saying earlier. Fluid spacing and stuff like that. That's in there and, and just, just chucking all that other stuff out and just like, let's just build websites quick, better, like fast and flexible. And, but there is, there always is a wall that you hit where it's either custom CSS, or if you're particularly if you're building for a client and they send you a Figma file that has a very specific design, you're like, I can't do this and block editor, I'm gonna have to rewrite some stuff. I don't know that responsive controls really fixes that part, but there's like, you know, the, the, the massive mound of people who are asking for it and feel like they can get some value out of it. And the, the kind of more recent models I've seen about using the device preview to sort of help do those fine tune controls, I think that's fine. And I don't think that's something we need to philosophically oppose in WordPress and take some kind of stance to say, we, we can't do it because intrinsic like the new way of life, I don't know. I don't necessarily believe all that. It's a lot of work and it's hard work, but it's not impossible to do these things. It's just priority. Like you're saying earlier, whether or not they think it's priority. And who dictates how these things end up in there? I don't know. Anymore. It's, it's kind of fuzzy, but I, if they do something responsive control wise, I think it would be valuable. And I think it would help ease the conversation of a lot of people who are saying like, I can't build on WordPress anymore because of these small things. And that's a big one that everyone points to and says, I can do this in Webflow. It's like, well, let's just get rid of that part of the conversation and bring those developers back in. And maybe it takes little things like that here and there to keep the kind of ecosystem going, you know? Yeah. It's funny because I have opinions about priorities in Gutenberg. And one thing that I was not really a huge fan of was the zoom out mode where it kind of zooms you that way. I thought, oh, that's kind of cool. But like so low on my priority list of other things where I'm like, I feel like. Whoever was working on that. Thank you. But like, man, it would have been really nice to just hit these other things. And then today I was actually working with a client and we were looking at their homepage and they wanted to move some sections of around and be like, actually this needs to be more featured and this needs to be less featured. And in that moment I thought, oh man, actually, if I had this, it would be super handy in this column with this client. And it was just like a good reminder of like, ah, damn, you know, no matter what you think is a priority, it's like every week I change my mind on what I think is a priority that I just have to like, stay, like you said, stay away from like the, the noise sometimes of about guys, but I do, yeah. Responsive really does feel like. At least some sort of a little bit of a, like, yeah, you can kind of move some things around or, or a little bit more control over how things stack and where they stack, maybe, you know, just some little tiny things like that would probably help. Yeah. Just, just starting with those, those smart things. It's like things, you know, 100% are going to need to change on mobile, like stacking order and things like that. Like you can start small and just slide little things in, you know, whatever. I don't know, but I agree. Yeah. Centering your text on mobile is like the most common one we get at, you know, all, everything goes centered on mobile. You know, when you, I'm actually just curious when you build all of your patterns and everything like that, do you have, you must have some level of like a, almost like an agency would have a workflow for like version control for tracking changes for like saving, branching, trying different things, not losing all your work and stuff. Cause I think everybody struggles a little bit with like, it's all just HTML floating around somewhere. And it might even be weird. Did you guys have to build any of that out or, or did you find a good system for that? Um, no, not really. We, cause I do like the source of truth design-wise is always in Figma. That's where the design lives. Then when I build them in, for like production, I build them on our cloud site. Basically it's like a WordPress site where they live, we build them and then we push them to a Postgres database, a super base, and that's where they're delivered from. So the site, the WordPress site that I build them on and all this kind of stuff, this, the media is stored is just, it's just version controlled, like via backup. So I don't have each pattern like yeah, GitHub or something like that. I'm trusting the system of WordPress and how it is and world of backups and because they exist on the WordPress site and, and our cloud, you know, there's some kind of backup system there. So it's pretty low key and I don't, I don't feel the need to change it too much based on it's pretty low stakes for us. Yeah. Cause once you release a pattern like into the cloud library, do you guys ever have to go back and change them? Like a new feature comes out, I like, I remember box shadows was like not around and now box shadows, do you go back to the old ones and kind of throw those things in or do you have to kind of leave them to support older sites or how do you like deal with those? No, we just, we just do it and I'll put it in there. I'll go into the, to the live site. I'll change it in there, click publish and it automatically pushes up to the cloud and then it's instantly available to a user to download. They don't have to update the plugin or anything like that since it's all in the cloud, they can immediately start using it. So, and if I think if you have like a box shadow call on a pattern and you don't have that on your site, it's just, it's just in the markup, I don't think it actually busts or anything like that. Yeah. So then what are you guys working on next? What's your like next big Oli exciting thing? Next big thing is I'm almost done with another collection and that's what's pretty cool. It's much bolder and colorful and all that stuff. And so I'm almost done designing it and then I'll convert them to patterns, which usually doesn't take too long. I've gotten pretty good at that part. And then, then I'm going to pivot to back to the setup wizard that we started with a year, two years ago, a long time ago, cause the internet to shut down for a few days, infamous setup wizard. I was like, I was, I needed a PR team in that small amount of time. They don't do PR teams in WordPress. No, they don't. No, they don't. They just give you the Twitter handle and you get to go crazy. Yep. Yep. That's right. And so we built a setup wizard. It was really cool. I had done this cool stuff, but it was very kind of blunted by the process that we tried to go about it. So that exists in OliPro, but now that we have all of these pro assets, these patterns, these styles, and kind of a better handle on how people are using it, I want to revisit that and rework it with that in mind so that we can do cool things like not just setting up a site with like pulling in a pattern collection and files. But if you're a builder, you might want to build your own theme or a child theme and just pull in these different assets, click a button and get that, that deliverable and all of these cool things. So we, luckily we already have this thing largely built out cause we already built it and so it's just like refreshing it with, with some of this stuff in mind. And then I think Q1 next year we'll probably be looking at the cloud thing, like letting users publish their own patterns into the cloud. I want to chat with some people first. I think they, again, that's such a big list. I want to understand how people use that and if they're actually going to use it. Because if there are other ways where people are like, nah, I just want to like do it through version control or something else, I want to understand that problem deeply before I go and try to like spend all this time and money on a problem that nobody really has. Yeah. Cause I remember Beaver Builder did a similar thing. They had a tool they released where you could take your Beaver Builder like templates and they would, you'd save them in your cloud and then you could go to other sites and pull them down and stuff like that. And I don't know how much it was used. Like, it's like, it might be one of the things that everybody thinks they want, but then they don't end up using, which is the worst place you can find yourself in, but it also might not. Like I definitely, I've been doing some other sites that I want to match my main site's branding. And so, I mean, it is, honestly, I can literally open one site and copy like a pattern and paste it. So it's not that hard of a problem, but yeah, like maybe that would have been helpful. Yeah. That's a good question. How come you don't do child themes? What was the decision on that? It's funny, I was just listening to a little thing today about child themes and kind of gave a few comments on that. You know, I think with what is possible now in WordPress, I think a lot of people don't need child themes, but then there are still, we still have plenty of people who use them. They want to customize the theme and bulletproof those changes. They don't want them messing around in the database and I have to move the changes from here to here and all this stuff. So they just lock them in a child theme. They can version control it and do whatever they want, kind of the best of both worlds. In terms of OLLI and the pattern collections, we just didn't need to really, because the kind of the beauty of WordPress now is that the value is all in these design tools that are already in core, right? And the kind of the way the colors and typography and all of that and theme JSON, the way that maps tools dictates that like you don't need child themes. You can just use styles, which is all like the pattern collections we have in OLLI pro are just all patterns, but they are pulling from different styles. So the startup collection pulls from the startup styles. But the cool thing is you don't have to use that. You can take all those patterns and flip it over to the studio style or the agency style, and you get like thousands of combinations that you can like, you know, mix and match. You couldn't really do that with a child theme. We could, it would just be, I don't know, I feel like it's just more of a headache. I feel like we didn't need to. And so I just, I just prefer to kind of keep it this way. And also I think it leans more into this kind of new wave of full site editing and style swapping and things like that. Yeah. I'm like, I actually make a child theme of OLLI, but you're right. Like if I started with a child theme of like creator, then like, how would I get patterns? So again, you're right. It would almost like segment everything too much if every collection was its own child theme. And then you wouldn't get to like have the freedom of mixing and matching, but I do it. I do have a child theme only because I've added some like Steam.js and stuff. And I do think it would be nice to see some way for you to like add some styles to patterns, not just in the UI. Like if you're like, Oh, I want bold headings here, but now I use that pattern, but on my site, headings aren't bold. There's something else. So now it's like, there's some little things like that, that would be nice to see that all like a little bit more composable than they finally got. Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think that's kind of how I'm seeing like customers. That's kind of some of the stuff they want. So yeah, I think we'll get to that point too. Yeah. So yeah. Thanks for talking. And like where, where should people go to sign up? Where should people get OLLI? Should people get OLLI? Should I tell them that too? Just kidding. I don't know. It's up to you people. You know, this is the era of do what you want. I think it's pretty cool. I think it's one of the more interesting things in WordPress. And I try to say that subjectively or objectively, I mean, because yeah, there's not a ton of, of super exciting stuff popping off right now, but I think we're showing people kind of maybe what it's like to build a modern day WordPress company and what it looks like to build alongside WordPress as the main product. And we're just kind of like sprinkling in the value where we can. And I think that's kind of a cool model. I think that's probably more where we're going for WordPress products these days, instead of building a giant entity and trying to like bolt it on to WordPress and say like, this is my thing. It's, I don't know, I feel like users are over that, that kind of whole Herculean product thing. And just, they want websites. They don't want all this junk. They just want websites. If you are interested in what I just said and all this past half hour talking, you can go to olliwp.com and you can try OLLI for free. And it's a block theme. You can use it just totally free. It's got a bunch of patterns in it. And then if you want a little bit more, if you want to get fancy and get a little sauce and you can get OLLI Pro and add some, a bunch more patterns to your site and build some really cool stuff. And we have videos and all that other stuff too. And I'm on Twitter still, and I'm going down with the ship. Any other time, I did create a blue sky account, but then I got a one. I was like, what the hell am I doing over here? I don't test. I can't think of it all over. Exactly. I was like, well, I can't, what am I doing here? So I'm still on X Twitter and you can find me there, Mike McAllister. I think I'm one of a few, so. Yeah, I think you're, you're actually, cause I was in a client site today where they have some sort of donation thing and it went from shortcodes the last time I logged in to this time. Layered their own like builder thing on top of it. That's like, doesn't look like anything in WordPress. Just like drag, you know, this, and it's like, I won't say which, who owns it or what plugin, but it's like a known, it's not, it's a known company. It's not as known to the companies, but like, it was just kind of like people really are excited about being close to core and it's like, I use your theme and I use a block from this and I use a block from this and it's a little teeny pieces and I didn't have to install a giant thing on top of it and it all works together and it's like, when you see that happening in real life, it's really exciting when you use some plugin where they built their own stupid thing on top of it, it's really, it breaks you out of your workflow. So yeah, if you're in like the close to core. Like world, you should be experimenting with Holly and all these other full setting themes. And, and you should be arguing with us on Twitter cause that's where, that's where the WordPress arguing is happening all day, every day for the past 10 years and probably for the next 10 years. So get in while the water's warm. All right. Thanks Mike. Yeah, you bet man. Thanks for chatting.
