So What? How To Replace Missing WordPress Plugins Using AI

Hello, happy Thursday, folks. This is So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I'm Chris. John is here. Katie is kayaking over Niagara Falls this week, I believe, or uh up the St.

Lawrence Seaway or something along those lines. So she's exactly thrill seeking. Um this week, we're gonna talk about uh replacing WordPress plugins, missing WordPress plugins, using AI, or using AI with WordPress in general. Now, for folks who may not be aware, WordPress is probably the most popular open source content management system. It runs blogs and different kinds of websites.

Um it is it has been around for like 20 years now, I think. And it is by far uh I think the most common content marketing system. It's uh many companies use it, many individuals use it for blogs and corporate sites and things. There are of course others like uh what Squarespace and Wix uh and you and newer platforms like Substack, but WordPress, the main advantage of WordPress is it's free and open source. So as long as you've got a good server uh and know what you're doing, you have a an enterprise grade content management system.

One of the there's two things that WordPress has that you would probably want to to customize, and many people have done this. The first is the theme, right? So if you go to trustinsights.ai, that's a WordPress site, it's got its own theme, which is the look and feel of the site. The second is plugins, and these are extra programs, extra pieces of software that you add into your WordPress instance to help it do extra things, like do certain types of video encoding so that you can have a YouTube uh video embedded on your site. Add in contact forms that talk to your CRM.

There's, I think it's what, like two, two or three million different WordPress plugins. John, you've been working using WordPress for a while, right? Uh probably about as long as I have. Uh, what have you used it for in the past? Well, it is, it's kind of the one-stop shop.

I mean, before we had these vendors that kind of made it accessible to anyone, the most effective tool for people that had you know some clue on how to run things was WordPress. And so it's stayed dominant because if you're if you need to go beyond just the, hey, I need a website for my restaurant or whatever, WordPress is the way to go. You can customize the front end, you can customize the back end, like you said, and then the ecosystem of plugins is just unbelievable, right? There's hundreds of thousands of apps that can do all kinds of stuff, and then complete flexibility and look and feel too, is the other thing. You know, there's all these, there's millions of templates out there, so you can get pretty much any kind of look that you want.

Um, yeah, we've been using it forever. We actually over the years have gone to WP Engine so that we have a hosted solution for them, and that makes a lot of things like backups and uh handling upgrades much easier. But yeah, it's pretty much still if you have some tech chops, it's the choice to go for your website because it's hard to beat the combination of flexibility and not that expensive. Exactly. So if you were to go over to WordPress's website, there's a whole plugins directory here.

They have some of their featured plugins and uh you know the most popular ones, and there's so many of these. And in many cases, the plugins are not made by WordPress. In many cases, they are made by somebody else, a third party, either for free, freemium, or paid. And they're again, there's a gazillion and a half. There's you know the very popular Yoast SEO.

There is rank math, WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, so many of these things. Today's show is about what happens when you have a plugin and you love it and you use it, and then it goes away. The developers abandon it, maybe the company gets shut down. Uh, but no matter what it is, the plugin is gone. What do you do?

In the old days, you had to go back to the codex, try to find something comparable, hope that you found something, and then you know, pony up more money, presumably, uh, for the replacement. Because in many cases, uh an older free plugin typically does get replaced by a paid plugin of some kind. And in these uh unpredictable economic times, uh spending more money on things that you've already bought is not the best idea. That was the old times. Today, in the era of generative AI, that's no longer the only option, as long as you've as you've got some really solid prompting chops and access to um some decent generative AI tools.

So let's start with finding a plugin that uh has gone away. And I'm gonna start with one. This is called short code exec PHP. This was one of my favorites, and you can see here the last time this was updated, some parts of this have not been updated in 15 years. All right?

This plugin is older than my youngest child. Yeah, it's been around forever. Is this the the short code? So this was you could on any post just put something like between brackets and it would automatically dynamically put in something else. Exactly.

So you could put in whole blocks of code or text or something that I used to love this plugin. There have been replacements since then and and there are some current ones but this one I liked so much because it was simple. It was free, like completely free, um and it was relatively lightweight. But it WordPress hasn't supported it in 10 years. The last time this was updated PHP was on version five and WordPress was on version three.

Now we're up to PHP 8.4 and WordPress 6.8 I think now but it it I mean basically the last time this plugin was seriously in use it was in the Obama administration. Just gonna show how how long it's been so what do you do if you wanted to bring this back to life um first of all the the easiest thing to do is to check to see if you're allowed to so for any plugin particularly well any piece of software in general uh you want to go into the software and look for the license this one is licensed under what's called the new general public license and the MIT license um which means that as long as you don't try to pass it off as your own as long as you open source your results you can do whatever you want with this thing. So that's what that effectively that that license means. It's called copy left. And it is essentially saying, yeah, you can do whatever you want, but you you you can't claim it as your own.

Um and you must share your revisions to it under the same license as it was made under, which is very cool because you think about commercial software, you know, that's completely copy protected. You can't make copies of it, you can't make derivatives, you can't make modifications. Uh, you can't download Salesforce and pass it off as some different CRM. So we're allowed to do it. The next part in the process of updating this thing is uh to step back and do some planning.

And so the planning that we're gonna do is we're gonna think through the 5P framework, which uh is covered at length uh in our new course, trustinsites.ai slash AI strategy course. Uh, this is the AI ready strategist course, just came out two days ago, and absolutely fantastic. So, we're gonna do a very brief abridged version of the full 5P framework. What's the purpose of what we're doing? We want this plugin to work again, right?

Because it was nice, it did a good job. Who are the people involved? There's the end user, which is the person who's who will use the software, and then there's the person who has to maintain the bloody thing, which would be uh us. What's the process? Well, there's the it's the software development lifecycle, the platform, uh it the software itself is WordPress, uh, which is a combination of PHP and JavaScript and HTML and CSS, and then the platform for AI that we're gonna use.

Uh, for today, we're gonna use Anthropix Claude because Claude is typically the best coding model uh available. Uh, all the other ones like ChatGPT, Gemini, and stuff are fine. So if that's what you got access to, not a problem. We specifically want to use the coding tools, so not the general web interface, but the actual coding tools, and you can get to these in a couple different ways. You can download them directly from the manufacturer.

Claude has what's called a Claude code. OpenAI has what's called Codex. Gemini has Gemini CLI. They all have their own coding tools. And the outcome, the performance, is the plugin works.

Hopefully. And we uh I I this is an unusual. I did not pre-bake anything for the show except getting the environment set up. So this could go all kinds of sideways. Oh, this is fantastic.

I thought you were gonna do normal pre bake. So all right, yeah, here we go. I'll have to do that. No, I ran out of time. I'll get my uh you know, soft shoe dance here if we have something gets stuck and I have to freestyle a uh a story or tell.

Exactly. So our first step is in that purpose statement. One the first thing you want to start with in in any kind of requirements gathering, uh any kind of software development is requirements gathering. The code exists already, right? So the we have to update it, but it is in existence.

So one of the things we want might want to do is instead of just starting from scratch, which would be uh not the best idea. What if we could reverse engineer a product requirements document from this? So I'm gonna go to Claude. I'm gonna say reverse engineer the PRD from the code base, starting with at short code executph. Oops, PHP.

So that's the entry point to the application. And then I have an exceedingly long prompt that is 342 lines of how to do this. Write the PRD to at docs PRD.md. A product requirements document exists for the purposes of helping a project manager know what the project's supposed to do and uh the way it's supposed to work, uh what success outcomes there are, what are the user stories, what are the functional requirements and non-functional requirements. And let's go ahead and have it.

So it's using there's a tool I have installed called Serena. Uh Serena MCP is a model context protocol, uh, which is fancy for an API for AI. And what it does is it runs locally as kind of a librarian in the project, and it keeps track of all the stuff because one of the challenges with AI is it forgets from chat to chat. Like you start a new chat and it completely forgets everything that you had in the previous chat. And so with no memory, you end up redoing things a lot.

If you use a tool like Serena, which is free and open source, now and it runs locally on your computers, no data goes anywhere, uh, it will remember from session to session what it is that that you're trying to do and will hopefully build uh you know help you build this thing. So while it's churning on that, the other thing we need to do is uh this is kind of awkward. I'm not a WordPress developer. So I don't actually know a whole lot about right. I can write in PHP, but I don't know a lot about developing for WordPress, which is awkward.

So how do we handle that? Well, you handle that by using AI. And the most straightforward way to handle that is to go to AI and say, I need you to do some research. And so I this part is pre-reaked. I said, I want you to do some research on what are today's WordPress coding standards.

Like we're literally write it out. And Jem and I went and did this and it created this 29-page document of here's everything that you need to know about the way WordPress works today and how to write good code for WordPress. You know, what testing tools to use and all that stuff. So that's going to go in our document folder in our project. We're going to put a little bit of that.

Like that's probably better documentation than has ever been done for WordPress, isn't it? I mean, we should probably I'm going to throw that up at right now on the training site for 40 bucks. We should have published that. You could, I mean deep research tools. And we've talked about this in the past, and it's covered in one of our uh in our gen of AI use cases course.

Yeah, deep research tools let you build custom manuals for anything. So instead of having the general documentation, you can say, I'm building this for this. Make me a manual for it. So uh really good example that is a very consumer one. Let's say you go and buy a piece of furniture at IKEA and you get the horrendous directions that come with it that are like what you can hand that product name a couple of photos from it, and then you know, or the PDF that you download from IKEA's website and say, with deep research, go and look at you know YouTube videos and other stuff, and then write me an actual manual for how to put this thing together.

Yeah, right. So you don't reach that thing where like you're on step seven and then you reach like step 18 and you're like, oh wait, that one part is backwards. I have to go like undo all this stuff. Uh-huh. In fact, that can be part of your deep research prompt is to say, based on YouTube videos and Reddit walkthroughs and stuff, people who've assembled this piece of furniture, you know, put a warning section up front.

What are the top five things that go wrong? Or what's the top five steps where you you put something on backwards because the manual is not clear? Because in the YouTube videos, people are saying, oh, watch out in this step here. The directions look like this, but it's actually this. Yeah, right, right.

That's again saving the world of pain. Exactly. So it is it is almost done building the requirements document. Uh we've so we've got our standards. Let's see.

Uh Claude is thinking about it. This, by the way, the process overall, when I've done this in the past, takes two to three hours typically because there's a lot of back and forth. So we're going to cover the the major steps of it. Um, but we're gonna we're I can guarantee we're gonna run out of time. So your requirements document comes first, comes second after your standards.

So go and do your deep research on on the software. Ideally, like if your plan supports it, which Gemini doesn't really have you know enforced research limits, chat GPT does. Uh you get 25 a month on the plus plan. If you can build a deep research report for the project specifically, so not just overall WordPress coding standards, but WordPress coding standards for plugins or WordPress coding standards for themes or whatever, so that the document gives is as narrow as it can be to the thing you're trying to solve. All right, yeah, that makes sense.

I yeah, it's just insane how that's one of the worst things about a lot of these open source tools is like when you run into some kind of problem you're like okay where the heck do I go like there's no manuals you literally didn't need to find somebody over on Reddit or you know over in some code repository someplace. Exactly and by the way this applies to any piece of software so if you said you know what I'm a HubSpot CRM user I want to do this task build me a manual for Hubspot CRM to do this task and you'll look at the HubSpot support forums look at the HubSpot Reddit group etc and then build me the manual for step by step how to do this and it will do a phenomenal job for you so if you hear like you know if you think about like because you you and Sean used to do stack and flow right about the like the different Martech. Yeah yeah I mean but because that was yeah that's funny isn't it it totally obviates that entire show now like before you used to need to just know where things were and now you could be like okay show me the five leaders in these five categories and uh yeah there's so much less rummaging around in the dark. Exactly but yeah for any product you could say like hey I'm aware that you know ABM is now ABX or whatever uh whatever we're calling it this week and what would it take to to implement something like that in HubSpot and you would commission a deep research report uh maybe even provide a PDF of the documentation it's available and let the models build that thing for you. Okay.

So while it's finishing up the PRD, the next thing that we have to do, if you the worst thing you could possibly do is just walk into the plugin and say, hey, update this plugin right that that that's just not going to go well. You'd want to have the PRD, you'd want to have the document stance, but you also want to have good testing. So there are there's five major tools for WordPress in particular that you need to have to be able to do uh WordPress development well. Um five test uh testing suites. On top of that, every programming language has some kind of testing suite.

So Python has Rough, MyPy, PyTest, and Bandit, uh, which test for you know syntax screw ups, static typing, unit tests, and security. Um WordPress has uh PHP CS, PHP stand, PHP unit, test, and I'm forgetting one. Um but all those exist so that they can do testing. Uh JavaScript and Chrome extensions have their own. So an important part of the process is you want to start out by saying, let's make sure our testing utilities are installed.

All right, I don't know why it's taking so long to write a requirements document because it really is not that complicated a piece of software. Right, yeah, yeah. It's uh just a plugin. It's really thinking hard about this. It better be a really good requirements document when it's done.

Like more documentation than this plugin has ever had in its entirety. You know, that's entirely possible because it the ex the original plugin didn't have a whole lot. Yeah, yeah. It was like one README, like eight lines of like, hey, this is made by good luck. Exactly.

Well, I mean, that's what I put in my software, is I says like this this software could very well light your computer on fire? Good luck to you. Um let's see. It's possible. No, it's still working.

Um it's uh so we're the next thing we want to do is we're gonna want to give it a really solid prompt to start the process of building out this thing. One of the tools I would recommend that you have some kind of voice interface. Um, because it's way easier to talk than it is to sit down and type, and it certainly is a lot more pleasant. Um, I built my own because you can in the age of AI. Um, but there are certainly plenty of commercial products out there.

So let's go ahead and start building this prompt. And we're gonna say, as it thinks forever here. I wonder if I should restart that. Oh, I'll leave it. Next, we're going to build the product requirements document.

Oh, wait, no, we start that next. We're going to build a file-by-file work plan to update the code base to make it compliant with the current WordPress standards for modern WordPress plugins. You'll need to read the standards that are in the docs folder. You'll need to read the product requirements document in the documents folder, and then develop a file by file work plan from the least dependencies to the most dependencies and write the work plan to the documents folder. Do not code, do not write code.

We are planning, thinking, and analyzing first. Ah, look, the requirements document is finally done. Um let's let's take a look at this thing because I'm I'm curious to see like if it's a novel. Yeah, how much uh grinding did it do? Let's take a look.

Let's bring it into here and make it large so that we can actually read it. Okay. It says reverse engineer PRD, executive summary, target audience, key values reusable, organization safety, project goals, dynamic content, centralized code management, user profiles. Nice user stories. This looks good.

Syntax imports. Oh, look, it actually put user stories for each of the requirements, the functional requirements. That's really nice. Security requirements, performance requirements, language support, internationalization. Um it did a really good job of reverse engineering the code base into a full requirements document.

Oh, yeah, there you go. File structure, like there's the meat of the thing. Exactly. So let's take our prompt and I'll I'll make this bigger so we can see it again here. Um so we have this work plan.

And let's make let's uh just give it a path at at docs work plan.md. So let's get this cooking in our environment. Oh I'll use string and mcp as needed. So this next step is for it to evaluate our existing code base and figure out where it's out of alignment and essentially you know what it's gonna take to update this thing. It and we've specifically we told it you're not gonna code yet.

Don't so don't start coding. You want to start planning. This is one of the things people get the most wrong with uh with generative AI, is you rush right into go do the thing. If you give it the chance to do multiple iterations of a plan, it does so much better. So typically what I will do is I will say, write the plan.

And then I will say, review the plan. And you know, with with uh the standards and stuff like that. And only once it's done uh write and a review, then you can say, okay, now turn on your coding agent and go and code the plan. If you just go straight in, a lot of the time you get uh spaghetti and you get unusable code because it's so eager to help and to start doing things that it never has a chance to review its own work, to check its own work and go, huh? Actually, there's this component down here which conflicts with this component here.

But if you give it the time to think and to review, you can sometimes get a big code project done in one shot because you've given it a couple of chances to review its plans.4 plus compatibility, WordPress current standards, security best practices. And it's now gonna, I'm gonna guess it's gonna take uh uh quite some time to uh to bake the actual plan here. So is this the point at which you're actually gonna pull the trigger? You tell it to go and update all the files individually, or how do you normally trigger that? Uh well we're gonna review once it's done, we're gonna review the plan.

Uh I don't want to just go and do the thing. Um, because I've one of the the gotchas with um Claude in particular, Claude is very susceptible to this. It has trained the most on enterprise software, right? It it has enterprise software best quality, you know, best practices and QA and all that stuff, which is good, but that means Claude has a strong tendency to over-engineer and over-complicate things. It will try to say, like, hey, these are the the known best practices for this kind of compliance.

You're like, dude, we're not building apps for the NSA here. We're making like a side scrolling shooter. Um so part of the revisions is to say, like, you should should, you know, this is this is who it's intended for. Make sure your plan is not, you know, so crazy that you'll never get it done, or you'll create spaghetti. Because the other issue is when it overcomplicates things, it has a tendency to just start creating all sorts of stuff that doesn't need, and then you end up with a code base that's three times as large as it should be because it makes stuff that it then doesn't use.

Right, yeah, you're just going completely beyond like you said. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, think about what would happen if you essentially had an employee who was on their own little island and would do work and had no ability to ask anybody else like questions and things, and they just kind of churned away and hoped that it worked out well. That's kind of what this is acting like, is it's it's acting like that that employees stranded on the desert island somewhere and they just they just crank away because like I don't know what to do here. Just faking every step, yeah.

Faking every step. Okay, it looks like the work plan is actually done in in near record time. So let's take a look at what it came up with. It says updating WordPress 6.4 plus, target PHP 7.4 plus. Uh we're going to look at this file naming standards, name and conventions, CSS standards, dependency hierarchy.

So it lays out and then goes file by file and says you need uh a good foundation, you need a better README, you have some changes. The CSS is understandably wrong. It's been 15 years. Uh and still doesn't work. Uh core models, core infrastructure.

Now the other thing is funny is called Claude has put in here like it's gonna take three to four days to do this project. Like it's writing for human developers, right? Right. We're gonna uh improve that. Exactly.

Uh core class modernization days five through eight, 12 to 16 hours worth of work. Um, I don't I don't know where it gets these estimates from all though the plan looks pretty solid. Um, so we're gonna say um let's go ahead and using Serena MCP and the debugging agent, implement the plan in full. When done. Use at agent context fetcher to update docs uh prd.md with the current state of the new fresh application.

Call the new version at PRD V2 that MD. So you don't damage the original. So now what happens is it's going to take its uh a debugging agent and it's gonna start looking at the plan step by step using the MCP server to remember what it's doing, and it's just gonna run through it. And this part, my guess is gonna take probably about an hour to hour and a half to do this part to update all the code. Once this part is done, then you run a QA agent to say the those five tests that we set up at the beginning.

All this code has to pass all five sets of tests. If it doesn't keep making changes until it passes all the tests. One of the things that AI does really, really well that humans don't is good testing. If you as long as you tell it, like, hey, these are the tests and these are the test conditions, you have to it has to pass all these tests, then what it's gonna do is it's gonna keep working. Whereas a human to be like, oh my god, I have to do another round of tests.

This is ridiculous. I don't want it, you totally like just take the code as it is. You pass three out of the five, and you're like, uh, we're gonna skip the last two. We're good. Exactly.

Whereas with this, you can say, you gotta pass all the quality tests. No, there's I'm not giving you a choice, and it will churn away until until it does. So the the debug agent will fix things, the testing agent will test things, and then once you're done, you can have it run uh a test version of WordPress right on your computer to make sure the plugin actually installs and doesn't throw any errors, and it can do all that automatically. And then by the time you're done, you've got a plugin that is ready for prime time that you're ready to take and and and push live. And you can put it up on GitHub, you could uh even put it in like the WordPress codex, right?

As long as you adhere to the license terms of the original, or you you remix your own, you can go ahead and do this, and it's fantastic. So, for example, uh my martial arts teacher has started a Substack, and uh he wanted to know how do I how do I get my Substack posts onto my WordPress site? Like, well, we can write a plugin for that. And so we followed this exact process, except instead of starting with an existing code base, which is started with something net new. Said, here's the requirements document, here's how to write WordPress plugins, build the thing, and in about three hours, I had a working plugin because it it did all the automation.

I installed it on his his WordPress site, and it works great. Um the key takeaway for marketers, especially is if there's a functionality you would like to have in WordPress and it doesn't exist or you don't want to pay for it, this is the exact process to use. So there's a there's a a plugin that I used to use called uh linked juicer, and it would um cross-link internal posts on your WordPress site to approve internal linking, and it was like 29.99 a month. I'm like, okay, but all you're doing is maintaining a lookup table and you're intercepting the HTML and rewriting it. That's not worth 30 bucks a month to me for someone to maintain that.

So out of curiosity, I we did this exact process and said, how much would it cost? Uh how much would it take to just build this thing net new? And but do it my way instead of you know the the way the plugin ends like okay, here's the plan, here's the PRD, here's the design, the work plan, and it goes and builds and runs the tests. And in a couple hours, I have a plugin now that I'm in the final round as a QA on it. Once it's done, that's going on my website, and I'm throwing overboard the old old uh link plugin, and now I've just got this thing that's like, okay, this this is gonna work for me.

If you're a marketer or any business person, and you have software and you're like, this kind of software's kind of a one-trick pony, and everything has a monthly fee now. Um, if I wanted to do this for myself, talk to your AI and say, how would I replicate this functionality? But do it my way. Um, like for example, the internal link juicers, there's some issues I have with them, the way they they work. I don't like the way they work.

So in my version, it said, okay, I want you to do it this way instead. And the AI tool is like, sure, we can do that, and it you know, mix the thing, and and you end up with a really, really powerful piece of software. When you think about the marketing over coffee website, John, what are the things that you wish it did? There's I know I I imagine this was impetus for the episode. There's a um listing back episodes in chronological order, uh, was a plugin that we used to have that died a year or two back, and that has like been sitting on my to-do list gathering dust for at least two or three quarters.

So that's uh would be at the top of the list. Yeah, anything for us that unlocks that content, you know. Like I manually do a best of list, you know, and so anything that could you know make it easier to search the archives or to do best of lists or whatever to make it more usable, you know, any of those plugins are great. Uh and then I think we have the standard gravity forms is up there to you know, grab subscribers to the mailing list, but that's just fill out the form and go feed. In fact, yeah, actually, I think maybe it's even shut off because I just have a feed the Google Doc thing in there right now.

So, but yeah, that could actually pump the addresses over to Ghosts too, instead of dumping them into a spreadsheet and me having to do that. So, yeah, there's uh, but the yeah, the archives is is the the first sore point. Yeah, and so let's think about so let's do the first part of this because we still have about 10 minutes left before we uh we we call it a day on this episode. Um, let's think about what that part of the process looks like because I think that's probably the hardest part. The coding agents is gonna do its thing, but actually thinking this through.

So today let's build a WordPress plugin that's gonna take our WordPress posts of a specific category, and it's going to show those posts in reverse chronological order, grouped by month and year, starting with the current month and current year, and then going backwards, split by month and year. It will uh be configured within the WordPress admin, and we're gonna we'll specify we'll give the user the chance to specify what post type or category that wants to be shown and what should be excluded, uh if anything. Okay, so that's the first part. What else? Um I'm trying to think.

So it's just the functionality of what it's doing, and then layout, is that have to be part of it or so layout could be part of it. Um, what do you what would you want to look like? Yeah, that's a good point. You know, instead of uh just a list of links, if it was links with the snippet, um because there actually is a field in there that um we use for um the SEO plugin for um uh whatever the name is. Yeah, uh, you know, so that we could use that instead of just grabbing the first paragraph or doing some random uh snippet.

Okay. So let's let's add that in. The desired output will be HTML on the page that will incorporate the post title with the post title linked, plus the snippet of the post below the post title in HTML unlisted bullet point format, so that the user can quickly see what the episode is about and whether they would want to listen to it or not. Okay, what else? That's pretty much it.

Um, yeah, it's not a complicated thing. I can't think of anything else off the top of my head. Okay, so here's what we're gonna do next. Based on these requirements, ask me one question at a time until you have enough information to build a product requirements document for this project. We are not coding.

Do not code, do not write code. A product requirements document contains user stories, functional requirements, non-functional requirements, domain requirements, technical requirements, libraries. A product requirements document is everything that a software project manager needs to manage a project fully self-contained. So make sure it has sufficient detail for doing that. Next, begin by asking me one question at a time until you have enough information to build the product requirements document.

So that's our prompt. So now we can go into any regular AI coding tool. Uh I'll pull up uh Anthropix Claude here. Um you could use Chat GPT, Gemini, it doesn't matter. We're gonna put that whole big honking thing in.

And now what it's going to do is start thinking through what we've described, and we've given it very specific directions. Again, we do not want coding right now. We want planning. Planning has to come first. So let's see.

Question one: display location and implementation. Where exactly should these group posts be displayed on the WordPress site? There should be a short code that users can place anywhere in posts and pages, and maybe even have a configurable to show a certain number of posts so that if I wanted to put the short code at the end of an episode, uh I could show just the last couple of posts, but then maybe I could also put it on a page and have it show all the available posts. Yeah, I like it. Okay, well, flexible short code with configurable parameters.

How should the plugin handle configuration between the WordPress admin settings? Should it be uh should default values the overrides, uh, should some settings be locked in the admin. Um let's have the admin settings serve as the default values that could be overridden by the short codes. And the specific parameters should be category, tags, post type, date, and limit and excluded items. Yeah, that's nice.

I hadn't thought of an excluded list, but yeah, that's always one of those things later on. You're like, oh, I wish we had one of those. Mm-hmm. Yep. Date parameter functionality.

Uh, what should the date parameter control? Should control starting, ending date, a date range, route time period. Let's have it be specified with a start date and end date or a date range, one of these. And give the user the option to specify something else using drop-down menus. Okay.

Date selection options. Um let's have it do relative periods, such as last 28 days, last 30 days, last 90 days, last 180 days, last 365 days. Okay, post snippet details. What should be the source of the snippet? The post excerpt if defined.

Um we use the rank math SEO tool, which should have snippets, but we should definitely use the default post excerpt to make sure that uh the content is there. If there is no excerpt, then we should just leave it blank, but we will still want to be able to show the post. The length should be a hundred and forty characters, uh rounded off at the nearest word boundary so that we're not showing half of a word. Um the post snippet length should be configurable in the admin instance, it should have a read more length, and uh HTML formatting should be stripped from the snippets. Claude is not exactly following directions, it is asking one question at a time, but each question seems to have like seven parts to it.

Um exclusions for the excluded. Uh, what should we all the user? Um the user should be able to specify specific post IDs, categories, tags, and the posts should be excludable in a checkbox list in the interface so that the user can pick and choose what posts or pages. Posts and pages should be separated so the pages can have check boxes in a separate part of the dialog box because there's a good chance that we're going to want to exclude pages more often than individual posts. Um the exclusions could work as a blacklist or a white list, so let's make sure both functionalities are available, and the user can choose that in the admin controls.

Uh, let's see. The plugin should inherit the styling and CSS of the master website itself and should not be able to add custom CSS because that can really screw things up. The heading hierarchy should be H2 for year, H3 for month. Yes. Uh, should be a visual separators, yes.

Use uh an HR separator on the page for those. And uh the user could have options for list versus card. I didn't even think about that, like lists versus cards. Pretty cool idea. Yeah, card.

That's newfangled cards in this thing here. Let's see, performance pagination. Um, there should be a maximum limit on total posts displayed. Uh, that can be configurable in the admin interface. The plugin should definitely implement pagination with 10 posts uh displayed by default.

That should be also user configurable in the admin. Uh the post should be lazy load to improve performance. Uh should definitely use caching with a seven day cache for persistence and uh show all posts only if a specific override is specified to show all posts. All right, admin interface should be a top level uh should definitely be its own menu item. Um this should definitely be its own top level menu item because we're gonna have a lot of these uh things in here.

We should we want tabs for organization. Uh we should have a preview area, we should have preset configurations, uh, and we should absolutely support import and export. The import and export should be done in JSON format. Now let's see, multi-site and permissions. Should it support multi-site?

Um, for simplicity's sake, let's not support multi-site right now. We can do that in version two. Uh let's see, user permissions and custom types. Um administrators and editors should have access, but again, this is something that should be configurable in the admin interface to allow the admin uh maximum flexibility. Uh the plugin should support custom posts types.

Um there should be no restriction on the use of the short code in pages. And yes, multiple configurations should be savable. Save configuration management. Uh, how should we reference in the short code? We should reference things by name because remembering IDs is just a pain in the butt.

Um, there should be a default configuration. Yes. Uh users should be able to duplicate and clone configurations. If a reference configuration is deleted, there should be a fallback to defaults. Uh, and configurations should have uh version history so that people can roll back in case they screw up.

All right, we're getting into super deluxe territory here. We are, but again, if you think about it, this is the kind of thing that you would want to do in a software design project. Um, because the time you spend doing requirements like this now saves a hundred X the time later when you get the first version, people like, oh, we're supposed to do this, and you're like, well, right. Well, because you get in a loop where you're like, oh, okay, we can do that. I just have to go rebuild all the previous stuff that we did.

Uh-huh. Exactly. Should it auto-detect SEO plugins? Yes, it should integrate with as much as possible while not uh bogging down the entire system. Uh, you'll want to use uh your web search tools to look at uh briefly what kinds of integrations and uh hooks need to be in place for other tools to talk to our plugin and for our plugin to talk to other tools.

Wow, that's nuts. I don't think it would go that deep. That's pretty crazy. Yeah, uh if you think about it, we there's so much stuff on a WordPress website that the chance of conflicts between plugins. Yeah, because there's the there's tons of them too.

Right. So there's Yoast, there's all in one SEO, there's rank math, hrefs has their own plugin, um, Moz has a plugin, Cloudflare has a plugin. So everybody has got a uh an SEO plugin of some kind. Uh let's see. For lazy loading posts should load automatically as the user scrolls.

Um the lazy loading yes should respect the month and year groupings, and yes, use a loading indicator of some kind. Store 30 days worth with a rolling window. Auto save should absolutely be supported because bad things happen. Um configuration should be exportable as a complete set only. Uh, when a configuration is deleted, it should be trashed and recoverable for 30 days.

So in the interest of time, since we're almost at time, uh, we can keep answering these questions outside of the live stream. But this is the process. Once you do this, it will draft a product requirements document. And then, as we did with the original plugin, from the product requirements document, you say, now build me a file by file work plan from least dependencies to most dependencies about how you would implement this. And then you have your coding age review the work plan, look for problems, and then say, off you go, go and build the thing uh and and let it uh let the machines chew on it.

So that's the process for replacing missing WordPress plugins, uh updating ones that are no longer supported, uh, or in a lot of cases saying, you know what, I don't want to pay 2999 a month to 82 plugins when the the value that they offer is not worth that. Yeah, that's a you know, it changes the game because everybody knows like you have your site, and after three or four years, you just have this huge giant long list of plugins that you're having to manage. And like you said, some of them are dying, and other ones you need to upgrade. And so having this in your toolbox to be able to just start replacing and having them do what exactly what you want them to do is huge. Yep.

And you follow the exact same process for WordPress themes. You would say, um, you know, let's start with a base theme of some kind. It could be 2025, it could be anyone. Do the deep research project on how to build child themes, and then follow the exact same steps to say, here's what I want in the theme. Here's this, here's this.

Um, you can have it do renderings in the in the canvas. So Claude supports us, ChatGPT supports us, Gemini supports us of examples. So you can actually like literally do the the design in partnership. Say, oh yeah, that's not the color scheme I had mine, or let's make it look like this. I like these fonts and stuff.

Um, and then it once you're done, have the tools QA the theme to make sure it's not gonna blow up your site, and bang, brand new theme. And and it's because it's a child theme. If the parent theme updates, it doesn't blow up all your work. Um, and you could do you know all the integrations you'd ever want. You know, does should your theme support Google Tag Manager um with an add-on, et cetera, all that stuff that we almost forget exists, but is really important.

Oh, that's so fantastic. I hadn't thought about that at all. But yeah, because that's one of the biggest things with child themes is when you start doing some of your own development down on the child theme. Now the parent comes out with an update, and you're like, oh, I have to integrate these things back together again. But to just run it through a prompt and say, hey, if I put my you know, my customizations in the new version, is it gonna break anything?

If not, go do it. Oh, that is just because like I can't remember what the hell I've tweaked six months later when the new update comes out. I'm just like, I fixed something. Exactly. And that's the thing is these these tools, as long as you do a good job with the planning, um, and you do a good job with good prompts, the tools do all the rest, right?

They the AI tools can do all the rest, they can implement the code. You just have to know what to ask for. It's kind of like you know, the the mythical genie in the lamp, right? As long as you are careful and thoughtful about what you ask for, uh, Robin Williams will not come out and wreck your day. Right, you can make you can survive.

Exactly. Uh, any final thoughts? No, this has been fantastic, though. I mean, thanks for this tour, because this you know, makes a bunch of annoying little headaches go away. Exactly.

And uh offline we'll keep tooling on this uh reverse posts plugin because there's a very good chance that it will come out like you know a Rolls Royce of reverse posts. But that's gonna do it for this week's episode. Thanks for tuning in, folks, and we will see you all on the next one. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it.

For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast at our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.