#153 – Tammie Lister on Modern Theme Development and Artistic Exploration

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast, from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case the underpinnings of modern theme development and artistic exploration within WordPress.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcasts players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea. Featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Tammie Lister. Tammie is a product creator focusing on WordPress. She has a hybrid background as a full stack product creator. She contributes to WordPress, and is passionate about open source and the WordPress community.

Tammie has a rich history with WordPress, having worked with themes and the platform for many years. Her journey melds her artistic flair with technical expertise, something which is, I think, quite rare. Her experience spans theme building, design, development, and more recently guiding product developers through Guildenberg, an initiative which she co-founded.

The fact that Tammie is both a designer and a technical expert has allowed her to offer a well-rounded perspective on the evolution and future of WordPress themes.

We explore the shift from Classic Themes to the era of Full Site Editing and theme.json, and discuss whether the lower than anticipated adoption of these new tools signifies a deeper trend or just a transitional phase.

Additionally, Tammie shares her insights on the necessity of beauty versus utility on the internet, the importance of experimentation in design, and how our definition of art and themes needs continual rethinking.

We also get into her personal artistic endeavors, where she balances her tech workspace with an art studio, highlighting her lifelong passion for photography.

If you’re curious about the current state of WordPress theming, the impact of emerging technologies on the platform, or how to infuse more creativity into your web projects, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so, without further delay, I bring you Tammie Lister

I am joined on the podcast by Tammie Lister. Hello, Tammie.

[00:03:14] Tammie Lister: Hello, how are you?

[00:03:15] Nathan Wrigley: Very good. I love the way that on these podcasts, we talk as if we’ve just started the call, whereas Tammie and I have already managed to chat for about an hour at least about all sorts of things.

But the endeavor today is to talk about themes. We’re going to come at it from a whole bunch of different angles, I hope.

But before we do that, I think it’s probably good that Tammie gets an opportunity to paint a picture of where her experience lies with WordPress and themes. So really I’m just asking you for your potted bio, Tammie, if that’s all right.

[00:03:43] Tammie Lister: Themes is really a thread that’s run throughout. I kind of started doing that within WordPress, and it’s actually the reason why I started doing WordPress. The best way I describe it is I was torturing my own CMS. And then I found, like everybody was doing that, right? Everyone had their own PHP insecure thing.

And then I found WordPress because I was blogging about design and development and then I just found themes and just fell in love Kubrick And then just really got into, through BuddyPress themes, through theming, and that’s kind of been my thread.

I would say I kind of work more on the product side now, and I also describe myself as a hybrid because I just like to do all the things. I like to do product, I like to do design and development. And I’m currently working both in creating things and supporting product developers through co-founding of Guildenberg, where we work with product makers, and I also work on so many different things, but I also work with themes as well.

[00:04:36] Nathan Wrigley: Are you one of those lucky people who is a hybrid of designer and technical?

[00:04:42] Tammie Lister: I mean, we could go that I’m not very good at either of them, but let’s go with I’m lucky in that I do both of them, yes.

[00:04:48] Nathan Wrigley: And have you always, dare I ask, have you always had a sort of an artistic flare? You know, when you were at school, were you always drawn to sort of putting paint on canvas and those kind of things?

[00:04:58] Tammie Lister: Yeah, so one of the things is because of my age, the web did not exist. I was creative, so therefore it was considered that because I was creative I had to go and do art. That was quite a narrow vision quite a few decades ago.

And I always had this love of computers, Acorn Electrons, all those kind of early computers. I still loved all of that kind of stuff. I’m lucky enough to have been, I’m 50 coming up this year, so I was lucky enough to have been from the start of computers, going all the way through. And I think if you have that, you are hybrid by nature, because you got to see the technology as it happened, even if you are kind of more on the artistic side.

So I did the art first of all. I actually did psychology, then I did art, and then I got to kind of retrain in software engineering. Most of my life I’ve done one, and then I’ve done the other, then I’ve done one, then I’ve done the other, and then this thing called product appeared in the universe, which we found a label to put on everybody. And I’ve adopted that because it actually fits.

[00:05:56] Nathan Wrigley: Coming from somebody who is profoundly unskilled in the artistic side of life, I’m quite jealous that you have that in your background.

[00:06:03] Tammie Lister: Thank you for saying I’m skilled. I’ll go with that.

[00:06:06] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, I know this is going off piste little bit, do you keep your hand in with the artistic side of things? I mean, I know that the listeners can’t see what I can see, but it looks like you’re in an environment where art materials may be a part of your daily life. Do you still do that?

[00:06:20] Tammie Lister: Yeah. I’m really lucky. So my office is half working for tech, like my desk, and then the other half is my art studio. And the half of my art studio has over the years, got bigger and started invading. So my art forms are primarily, either digital art, painting, and it’s an easel the other side, or photography.

So even like one of my art forms is very very technical. So when you actually study art, you have to pick mediums and those were the mediums. So photography is one of the mediums that’s run throughout, and that’s probably like one of the most technical art forms that you can do as well.

[00:06:52] Nathan Wrigley: I am going to ask you a really unfair question, but if the universe conspired so that you could only keep one form of art, be that photography, painting or the online stuff or, I don’t know, Photoshop. What would be the one which speaks to you the most? The one that you would jettison as a last resort?

[00:07:11] Tammie Lister: Photography, because it’s been something that I’ve just in different mediums. We were talking before, one of my, projects is weird cameras. I am currently playing with a camera that does thermo printing onto receipts. But, I love the idea that you can take pictures into different things, even if you do like pinhole cameras. So yeah, the idea that you can capture pictures that way, or that you can capture pictures and then even like through AI, manipulate them. That’s something that super interests me.

[00:07:37] Nathan Wrigley: I always think there’s something really magical about holding that piece of equipment in your hand as well. I don’t know what it is, the internet, you can’t get your hands on it in the same way can you, as you can with a piece of art or a camera or what have you? And I think there’s just something very human there.

[00:07:48] Tammie Lister: You get so nerdy about your cameras. If you find the cameras, I’m a Fuji person, and you find your kind of kits and your, yeah. That’s a different podcast. But like I could get equally as nerdy about themes as I could about my camera set up. So yeah.

[00:08:03] Nathan Wrigley: So pivoting more towards the internet then, and again, we’re not getting into the subject at hand, but I’m enjoying this conversation, so lets keep it going for a few minutes. Do you think the internet requires beauty? Or is that kind of like an added benefit? So a typical website, does it need to be beautiful or is the internet a more utilitarian thing, or is it more of a website by website, case by case basis?

[00:08:26] Tammie Lister: So I think it’s a little bit of case by case. It depends. I will always love experimentation, but I studied art in the days of installation rooms, and the really weird nineties art. So that’s kind of like my grounding is like the weird stuff. The modern art that a lot of people look at and go, huh I quite like a lot of that. But also, through experimentation, we also find out what can be maybe applied to more usable content.

And I think that that’s something to be said like, will a real pushed experiment be used by everybody? Nope, not probably. But can it push the medium? Yes. And that is also something that’s been done time and time again in art.

But I think it’s really careful to, the word art is used a little bit too broadly. Art means something very different from design, and those need to be defined separately a little bit when we’re saying it. The whole first year of studying art is trying to define the word art, when you study it. Trying to define the word art as a whole thing. And we just, particularly in the digital world, we’re like, yeah, it’s art. I don’t think the people that studied art, and art history, would be saying that as well. Sometimes we apply words in our industry that we are maybe applying that we shouldn’t as well.

So where I like to see it is experimentation, and I think we need more experimentation in our medium to get it forward a little bit. But then for use case, yeah, that deviated quite a lot in saying it.

[00:09:52] Nathan Wrigley: No, no, but that’s interesting because I guess with things like the advent of CMSs and the growing popularity of CMSs, it is possible to go into a very cookie cutter kind of approach to websites. You know, it’s got a header, it’s got a footer, it’s got a hero and what have you.

And the internet for many people has become a bit of a stale place, and there’s not much innovation. You know, if you go to a bookshop and you look at the magazines, especially if you’re probably not looking at car mechanics, but if you’re heading towards the more artistic side of things, the innovation there is really profound. And I know you can find examples of that on the internet.

[00:10:24] Tammie Lister: But that happens also in art. Homogenisation of art also happens. So you’ll find that, you’ll go through periods where great art, artistic periods and just liveliness and periods where boundaries are pushed in art, and it’s amazing and it’s great. And then this homogenised periods of just like beige art comes out, and doesn’t feel that anyone’s pushing any boundaries or anyone’s doing it, and it just all feels the same.

We are maybe going through one of those. I would argue that what we are going through is maybe some of the technology is the bit that’s changing, and experimental. So maybe the things that we are not seeing on the top are the things that are changing, and the top needed to distill anyway. And I think that that’s probably the biggest change we are going to be experiencing or we should be experiencing is the top doesn’t matter. And I think that’s going to be quite ground breaking to a lot of us.

Back not too long ago, we used to be very precious about the design. You’d get this design and you’d be pixel perfect making it, and you’d be measuring it, and you’d be getting out your, how many widget screen rulers, right? And you’d be measuring it and doing break widths, and points and all these kind of things. And I don’t know what that word is, the break points and doing all these kind of measures and being very precise about it.

And now that time is changing. Now you are looking at fluid typography. Now you are looking at, how does this respond? And it’s not that it responds in breakpoints, you don’t know what device someone’s going to be viewing on. They could be viewing it through goggles. All these kind of different experiences, and you may not have ever used the device that they’re experiencing on. Try browser testing every single browser in the world, good luck.

But that’s the reality that you’re working in now. And when you’re working in that, the interface has to be secondary, and personalisation is quite key for the user. And that’s quite hard for us to understand, that the interface could be heavily changed and should be heavily changed depending on the user need, rather than it being this perfect vision.

But then again, some things are just going to be an experience. So you are going to wander in, and it’s going to be a beautifully kept shop front because it feels like that. It’s use case, right?

[00:12:31] Nathan Wrigley: The changes that have happened in the WordPress space, let’s say over the last five or six years. So we went from what we might call Classic Themes. I guess that’s the term that most people would be familiar with, where you are interacting with template files. And now we’re in an era of Full site editing or Site Editing. The interface in WordPress, if you don’t install a Classic Theme, allows you to do all of that in a, kind of more or less what you see what you get. You can interact with the templates, for want of a better word, inside of a GUI, and you can use the mouse instead of using a text editor and what have you.

Now, that project, on the face of it, five or six years ago, obviously it was hoped that that would receive wide adoption, and I think maybe the upper echelons of the WordPress project were maybe assuming that people would jump on board with this. But it seems like that really hasn’t happened.

I have a memory, I don’t really know if the numbers I’m about to say are correct, but I have a memory that it was hoped that within a year of Full Site Editing coming around, that there’d be 5,000 themes inside the .org repo.

I think we’ve really only just now, so five years later, gone past 1000. I wonder if you’ve got any intuitions as to why it hasn’t been adopted, not just by end users, but also developers, and agencies, and all these different people? Has it stagnated? Is it a project which has got no legs? Are people going to use classic themes forever? What’s your thoughts?

[00:13:52] Tammie Lister: So I think there’s a lot of points there, but I think there’s a couple points. Splitting out the infrastructure from the interface is kind of important. So are people using the underpinning technologies? Or are they only using the interface? And I think that’s something to consider.

So the, page builder, the site editor is different from, using theme json maybe. So that’s also something to consider. So some agencies maybe aren’t turning on Site Editor, but they’re using theme json. That’s like a really basic example of that.

I think that, is actually probably quite a strong case. Using the org theme repo as the measure. I’m not sure that necessarily holds up to adoption, all the time. Whilst I would love there to be so many things available for people and all that kind of thing, I don’t know whether people or times are different, I don’t know the answer to that. I think that, what I try and look at are agencies using it? Are people using it? Are people separating their plugin from their theme? Because that’s one impact. Are people looking at ways to improve their classic base to onboard off? Are they looking at ways to do it slowly and all those kind of things. And that has been happening more and more. So I think that.

But honestly, it takes a change. Theme development has been the same for a very very long time. Yeah, I was lucky enough to be around when the changes happened. So it’s easy to change if you are around when the changes happen. It’s easy, right? Like I can understand that. I also, for me being a hybrid, it’s a little bit easier to adopt different things, because I can just be a bit more flexible, I think about different things.

But if you are using a big stack, agencies as well go to, if you’re an enterprise agency and you’ve got a big stack, and you are pre-compiling SaaS, and you’re doing all these kind of things, to then suddenly change to theme json, that’s a big mind flip to suddenly do that.

And that requires you to either pause, do lots of retraining, or to look at your foundation theme that you’re using, or to do some refactoring of infrastructure. So maybe to do some training. There’s all manner of different things that you’ve got to do, so I don’t think you’re going to do it in that kind of turnaround time.

And also the time it happened was quite a boom time for agencies to be actually creating sites, which is kind of awesome. Lots of agencies were creating lots of sites at the same time. So for them to pause and say, hang on, not going to go and work on all these projects.

What I actually saw was people thinking how they could sprinkle bits of it in, that has been really good. I think now most agencies that have found their path ,or found their groove with it,` or found the way that they are doing it. That’s kind of most pieces. But we haven’t necessarily seen that reflecting in the theme repo in the amount. So that would probably be a reflection of whether that number is going to be that measure or not.

[00:16:43] Nathan Wrigley: So let me just try and sort of parse everything that you’ve just said, and see if what you’ve just said makes sense to me. So, what you are saying is that the adoption might not necessarily be reflected solely in the repo numbers. So whether it’s 2000, 1000, what have you. It’s the, and I think you called it underpinning technology, so the move to, for example, theme json and what have you. And you can dip your toes into bits of that.

[00:17:07] Tammie Lister: Yeah, there was actually a really good post by Anne McCarthy right back in the day where she was like, here are the little pieces you can use, right back at the start And that was really powerful because I think before people were like, I have to do everything. No you don’t, is the answer. And once that message started to get out, there was a bit of a shift to people starting to be able to be, okay, I can do some sprinkles.

[00:17:28] Nathan Wrigley: I think also the reality is, WordPress has been incredibly good at being backwards compatible, and really not changing a great deal for huge swathes of time. And then this fairly magnificently large change came along, and in other projects when they go through point releases, so Drupal is one that I’m familiar with, they sort of throw the baby out with the bath water a little bit. And as a result, I think over time they do lose people because of that, in their communities I mean, because of that backwards compatability thing has gone.

And I’m just wondering if, like you said, if you’re an agency, and you’ve got a bulletproof process that you’ve worked out for the last decade or more, it would be unrealistic for you to suddenly change to the new paradigm, and to do everything with, for example, blocks or theme json. Rather than to just pick, well, either we’re going to do nothing, we’re going to stick with the way we’ve always done it, or we’re just going to take little bits here and there, because we can’t afford to just do everything. We’d have to retrain all of our staff, we’d have to retrain all of our clients and so on.

So it sounds like you are buoyant. You don’t see the number in the repo as a negative thing, it’s just, this is the journey we’re on, but there’s way more, if you peel back the curtain, there’s more bits of in intel which need to be brought to bear. So that’s interesting, you are fairly sanguine about it.

[00:18:40] Tammie Lister: Not everyone’s always going to have the interface on, or they may even use a different page builder. I think that’s something to kind of be aware. Maybe they are using the technology underneath, the infrastructure underneath, but they’re using a different page builder.

Maybe they are using everything up to a point, but because their client doesn’t want it for the end user, they aren’t turning on the Site Editor interface for users. That is really common in enterprise, because they do not want color palettes and, all those kind of things, for end users. So those kind of like sliding scale.

But also I think, from a release perspective and themes, I think we now need to be, and this is kind of a really curious conversation, is do we measure it by themes, or do we measure by patterns, or do we measure by templates? And if you look at the pattern directory, there have been quite a lot of, patterns, and there have been a lot of, the Museum of Block Art and the amount of patterns that have happened. Or if you look at Twenty Twenty Five, the amount of patterns in there. Now, that’s quite a lot. So if you think about that, that to me is almost like how we would consider themes to have been done.

And we are getting to a point where, what is a theme? And that’s like a whole different discussion, which I love. Because for me, I’ve gone backwards and forwards in this every few years, of I think initially I was like, themes have to be a thing. And now I’m not in that position anymore. I wish I could time travel back and flick myself on the nose, but you know that’s age. Because I definitely feel that as

long as we have a lot of the infrastructure, and we have a lot of the firm things in place, it’s a design system, and that’s what a theme should be. So what you are doing is you’re setting the tone and style as you load it. So this is the weird analogy I use, which is when you change clothes, you don’t take your arm off. Bear with me. The whole idea is that you should be able to take a theme on and off site without having any implications to it. That’s the whole point. It shouldn’t impact it. You should be able to use it like clothing. And it shouldn’t style it. So that gets to, is a theme just styles? And that’s the whole conversation of don’t put blocks in themes.

Don’t just have it for super light. All those kind of like, that take the functionality out, don’t have plugins in it. All those kind of things that we go back to where we were a few years ago, which is don’t put plugins in themes as well. So yeah, there’s a lot there.

[00:21:06] Nathan Wrigley: I remember probably three or four years ago, Rich Tabor, who at the time wasn’t working with Automattic but now is, raising the question of whether we should just have a theme, singular theme for WordPress. And everything else falls into the domain of patterns. And that was a really curious thought at the time. But the more that I’ve played with it, the more that I am fascinated by patterns, and not so much the theme. The theme is more of a sort of set it and forget it enterprise, you just do it this one time, set some basics in there.

[00:21:36] Tammie Lister: See I guess now I’d be like, okay, what is the theme if it is the theme, and do we even need the theme? And is the package just, like I think we’ve come so far because WordPress has a design system. We’ve come so far that probably, like over the holidays because everyone does a project, right? Yet again, I did a theme and I literally used Site Editor’s Dreamweaver. That’s the best way I can describe how I create. I loaded it up and I haven’t used any custom CSS. I literally within a few hours had a theme. Hardly any customisation. No templates, anything, and that’s relying on mostly native stuff. I’m not relying on anything, and I move that across four different sites.

It works. Am I going to release it and package it? No. I’m not going to give that to anyone else, because it’s not ready or worth it or like anything yet. And that may also be part of this. Maybe, going back to our initial conversation, maybe what we’re doing is encouraging more experimentation. That could be a problem if we’re not sharing our experiments. And that’s a whole different conversation about, we should share our experiments more, and we shouldn’t just leave them as experiments.

But, to me what all of this has done is encouraged me to have that early. You know remember Kubrick? Being able to just experiment freely. And it probably was actually quite a hurdle we had to experiment. It was harder than, now looking back at it we’re like, that probably was really difficult. But I remember the first time, twice a year you would do the whole thing. Style switches were a big thing. I’ve now got a switcher on my site, just because I’m back there. What’s old is new again and all those kind of things.

We could never settle on one style because we always wanted to do more than one. It was so easy to do. We were always obsessed with changing our themes because it was so cool to do. We were making them so many times. Maybe that’s part of, we’re in a period where everyone’s just experimenting and learning so much that we are not quite releasing yet. And that’s okay because we’re learning and we’re in our sketchbook, learning those boundaries.

[00:23:36] Nathan Wrigley: Do you remember CSS Zen Garden?

[00:23:38] Tammie Lister: Oh, I love that. Yeah, we should have that for block themes really.

[00:23:42] Nathan Wrigley: It was fascinating, wasn’t it? How the content layer, and that was in the day when CSS was a brand new thing, and the idea that you could separate the markup from the styling was really revolutionary. And I remember being bowled over by that.

[00:23:54] Tammie Lister: I mean the thing was with themes, that was why WordPress struck me originally was, I can just change, I don’t have to manage my content. I don’t have to worry about being insecure or being hacked. I don’t have to worry about that. I can just do the fun stuff. And then CSS got really cool, and then it got really complicated with SaaS. And then I started using JavaScript, I got really overly complicated. And then Modernizr, and all those kind of things. And life just got way too complicated.

And one thing I like now is life is really, really easy when I want to make a theme. I’ll do a sketch, I don’t even do it in Figma anymore. I just do a little bit of a sketch, work out my colors, and then I just use it as Dreamweaver. But that’s not release ready that way. It would be taking it. You know I use Create Block Theme plugin and then I parse it, I clean it, and all those kind of things.

[00:24:44] Nathan Wrigley: Just moving outside of the WordPress space for a moment, it seems like CSS is really interesting again. A lot of the JavaScript things that we’re familiar with only being possible with JavaScript, it feels like so much interesting stuff going on with just web standards and CSS in particular, and there’s a lot of fascinating stuff happening.

[00:25:05] Tammie Lister: HSL is my current love. I’m completely nerdy. I’ve been, playing with that and just, I remember just the sheer pain of even doing parallax years ago, and all those kind of things that we don’t have those issues with.

The fact now that we have such good libraries that we can have confidence in as well, that are open and universal as well for animations and different things that you can do.

I think sometimes it does raise the expectation, if I put my front end developer hat on, it does raise the expectation, makes front end developers life really difficult, because we were always told don’t use libraries in one part, right, from performance perspective. And now it’s about knowing the right ones to use, in the right combination. Because you can achieve some of this stuff without using some of those libraries, and some of them are React as well. So it is like the, kind of where you use or what, you don’t use.

[00:25:59] Nathan Wrigley: Just getting back to the conversation about the adoption, or lack thereof, of Full Site Editing and what have you, and theme json and all of that. We’ll obviously mention the fact that what you said 10 minutes ago is true. You know, the underpinning technology may well be being used by people.

I do wonder though if the Block Editor or the Site Editor interface, do you think there’s something to be said about that whole interface and the fact that it’s constantly in flux? And it is quite difficult to realise where things are happening. And the fact that you’ve got menus that you have to return to. You know, you might not be able to find your way there quickly because the sort of whole menu structure disappears, and you have to click buttons to get back to it, and then remember where they all are, and they get upended all the time.

I’m just wondering if the UI, where we are at the moment, January 2025, I do wonder if that puts people off because it’s in such a state of flux and it’s confusing and it’s not quite finessed yet.

[00:26:55] Tammie Lister: So I have my kind of predictions I guess, of like where I would like see over the next kind of few years. I think we’re going to see that interface is going to do what it’s going to do. It’s core and it’s going to be iterated, but I think you’re going to see a lot of solutions building on top of that, or adapting to it. And I see more variations. You know I’d love to be able to say, hey, now I’m in sketch mode. Just let me do my sketching, right. And be able to see it. In fact, I’ve been playing around with that, with my rubber ducky cursor and all those kind of things, and trying to work out that, and I don’t think I’m alone with that. Like trying to figure out how do you get the editor interface to be exactly what you want. But that’s exactly what I want. That doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily going to have that as a final product.

But I think that there’s an argument for types of users, and there’s definitely an argument for page builders for types. There’s definitely an argument for, niche, niches, could be a really big one. Or page builders that build on top of it. And we’ve seen quite a lot of that, like filling in the gaps. Core is always going to do the middle. Core is always going to be trying to, it’s always going to be the first attempt.

So a good example is fluid typography, that’s just come out. So that’s the first version of it, right? Like the first version of where the things are going to be. The things I worked on in phase one, if they still look like the way they did in phase one in the Block Editor, we would have a problem. They do not look like that now. Because time has moved on. And the Site Editor, a lot of the bigger interface things came last. Because if you bear in mind when you build a house, you build the foundations first. So a lot of the interface stuff came last. So a lot of that stuff still needs to be iterated on.

So, yes, it does need to be iterated on, point 1. But that doesn’t make it easy for what you were saying about documentation, for people learning and people doing things. So I do think there’s an argument for people having page builders. Page builders responding with a native layer. I don’t think there’s ever been an argument that people shouldn’t have page builders, or at least I personally haven’t said that. If you’re going to build a page builder on top of native, great. Find where the gaps are in the area you are pitching for, and make it work, and then keep a connection to it, and that’s going to work great. You know rise up. As Core rises up, rise up with your product. That’s kind of the open source way, right?

So I’m kind of curious to see what happens. I would love to see the ability to customise a little bit more if I had, ifs and buts and wishes. But I just think that that’s maybe an expectation of interfaces that we have now. We got it with light and dark mode, and we seem to really have that now with like everything should be draggable. There’s a difference, right? AI has happened in a year, but also draggable interface have happened in six months. Suddenly most interfaces have draggy handles everywhere, and you can reposition things and pin them. Like we’ve only got one pinnable sidebar. So I think that would be nice. Because at the moment it kind of just says, I’m here, and you have to live with it being here. So things like that.

My biggest thing has been able to just the latest situations of get out mode is the best way I can describe it is widescreen, right? I call it get out mode, because it just gets out of here. But that, things like that are polished. It’s done upon those extra bits. And they’re not bits that were there initially, and we often judge bits and we think the good bits we think have been there all along, well they haven’t been.

[00:30:11] Nathan Wrigley: That UI is so great if you’ve got a long piece of content, and you can’t really encapsulate in your mind what the top to bottom of it looks like.

[00:30:19] Tammie Lister: Remember like when, you used to have patterns out, then you’d lose sight of where the pattern was going to go, or like how it was going to look. Just the fact that it just goes a little bit small. It’s like yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s some perspective to what I’m creating, and it feels like okay, we’re not in like the inception world where I’m touchy feeling things and moving them around or whatever. We’re not in that. But we are kind of feeling like I’m building.

And for me personally, the editor has a couple of different functions, and maybe one of the answers is it should, back when I was working on it, there was this kind of concept of modes, and it kind of didn’t have distinct modes, it flowed. I go backwards and forwards on whether it should have distinct or flow. I think by its nature it is having distinct modes. And one of the modes I find myself in a lot is build mode. If I’m in site editor, I’m a Bob the Builder. That’s what I’m doing. I’m getting in there. I’m Dreamweavering it. I’m digging in, and I want a very different experience to that than I want to,. Like Figma is my, or Penpot is where I’m building. And when I’m composing, I’m in a very different experience to that. I wouldn’t write in Figma.

[00:31:24] Nathan Wrigley: I do like the idea, and I think you alluded to it earlier, I do like the idea of different, for want of a better word, editor modes. Where the UI is really different for a different user. And obviously we have the capability to kind of, historically WordPress, I don’t know, at the very least, remove a menu item for example, or a button doesn’t exist if you’re particular person. But the idea of amending the entire UI so that it binds itself more to the work that you are doing, that’s really interesting.

[00:31:53] Tammie Lister: With AI we’ve got a bit more possibility of looking at what task you’re doing and then adapt. So one of the things that really excites me about AI isn’t necessarily the content generation, but is the realizing what you’re doing. At the moment, we have the set options and get things out of your way. But what I like is when applications are learning my behaviors, or learning what I like. Maybe I’m just selfish. I like that, and I like the fact that they’re learning, rather than me having to, when it loads up, me having to put the sidebar out the way, every single time. It’ll be like, oh no, you actually really like this to be out the way, and this is where you go. So when I load it up, it just does that each time.

It’s such a small thing, but I mean it’s a persistent save mode of the screen and all those kind of things. But it feels magic when it works properly. Or recommending, it’s like hey, you like this? Have you tried this? Because you are obviously a builder. We’ve heard that other builders like this.

[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: I imagine all of these things could come to pass. I know that there’s a lot of work to be done before those things. Just before we round it off, something that you said you wanted to mention, which we haven’t done, is something called hybrid themes.

Now, I’ve not really touched on this with anybody thus far in any of the podcast episodes I’ve done. And it occurs to me that I would imagine most of the audience won’t be familiar with that term.

[00:33:07] Tammie Lister: So I don’t actually like the term, that’s why we were talking about it. So it’s a term that currently is used for a theme that sits between Classic and Block Themes. And for me personally, and you can get into why it does, I don’t think we should use the term, that’s kind of why I wouldn’t get into them too much. And I know that there’s some really good documentation explaining them, and I don’t want to belittle or anything with that documentation. I think they have a place. But my kind of general point is I think they really confuse users.

If I am working with a client and I am saying to them, hey, we’re working on a theme. It’s hard enough to get them to work with a Block Theme, or I don’t even actually use the term Classic, although I actually have a site that says Classic, but generally they’re not thinking Classic. They’re thinking that it is their theme. And it’s a classic, what it’s old?

But generally to then say hybrid as well. I mean in cars it’s not so good at either. I made that joke of like, I’m a hybrid. I’m not good at either, kind of thing. It’s like the theme isn’t good at either. And really to me a Block Theme can just be, I go back to that post by Anne, you can just do a little bit, you could just have a little bit and it’s a Block Theme. But I think sometimes it’s used to distinguish when, and more templating all of those kind of things with hybrid. But there’s a lot more to it than terms like that. So I don’t want to dismiss it. But for me it’s a lot simpler if we think of it in those kind of opposites.

I’m weird about Classic. So themes and block themes maybe? That’s maybe a kind of, I mean honestly it’s themes, and it just depends on how you are doing the theme really. And that’s what it comes down to. And I think if we saw it that way, then probably people would be like, okay, I’m going to make a theme that suits this purpose. And then they’d be popping on it. Because there was a time when people were taking offense to it being called Classic Themes, and that’s not maybe what we should be doing if we wanting people to use it.

[00:35:05] Nathan Wrigley: I think it sounds from everything that you’ve said that you’re fairly bullish about the future with WordPress themes, and the theming engine that we’ve got, and the opportunities in the future.

[00:35:14] Tammie Lister: Not just themes. I think that WordPress is always going to need a front visual, right? And you are going to be packaging, one of the core principles we have is you can package that style up, and I can give you that style, and you can go and take that and put it on any site. What that package, that theme is going to be in the future, I don’t know. That might be just a json file. That might be a file of an emoji smile. I don’t know. That might just be literally a json file. That could be all it is, is one file going forward. And that might be amazing, and it will pull in all these patterns, and it’ll pull in everything.

But that still will be a theme, and that still will have had someone creative come along and determine that all these patterns and these colour combinations go. And they will work with an AI to come up with colour combination suggestion, all those kind of things. So you’re still going to have that. But it’s the idea that you can still take it from one site to the other, and still have that styling. I think that’s still there. I just think we’ve got to maybe be a bit more adaptive about what that term means, and maybe just all call it themes.

[00:36:22] Nathan Wrigley: I imagine there’s going to be a bunch of people listening to this who are going to stick to what we’re going to call Classic Themes until they simply are no longer an option. There’ll be other people who are somewhere along the journey, and they’re dipping into, well, for want of a better word, hybrid. Or there’s people who are doing the whole thing with the Site Editor.

Regardless of that, if people wanted to find you and talk to you about your journey and any help that you may be able to give them, making that migration, where’s the best place to get in touch with you, Tammie?

[00:36:53] Tammie Lister: Yeah, So you can find me at my site, tammielister.com. And you can also find me on all the socials at Karmatosed. I also have a theme site called ‘Classic To Block’.

[00:37:05] Nathan Wrigley: I will put all of those into the show notes so everybody can find all of the different places where you are available. But, Tammie Lister, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:37:15] Tammie Lister: Thank you.

On the podcast today we have Tammie Lister.

Tammie is a product creator focusing on WordPress. She has a hybrid background as a full stack product creator. She contributes to WordPress and is passionate about Open Source and the WordPress community.

Tammie has a rich history with WordPress, having worked with themes and the platform for many years. Her journey melds her artistic flair with technical expertise, something which is, I think, quite rare. Her experience spans theme building, design, development, and more recently, guiding product developers through Guildenberg, an initiative which she co-founded.

The fact that Tammie is both a designer and a technical expert has allowed her to offer a well-rounded perspective on the evolution and future of WordPress themes. We explore the shift from classic themes to the new era of Full Site Editing and theme.json, and discuss whether the slower-than-anticipated adoption of these new tools signifies a deeper trend, or just a transitional phase.

Additionally, Tammie shares her insights on the necessity of beauty versus utility on the internet, the importance of experimentation in design, and how our definition of art and themes needs continual rethinking.

We also get into her personal artistic endeavors, where she balances her tech workspace with an art studio, highlighting her lifelong passion for photography.

If you’re curious about the current state of WordPress theming, the impact of emerging technologies on the platform, or how to infuse more creativity into your web projects, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Tammie’s website

Guildenberg

Pattern Directory

Museum of Block Art

Create Block Theme plugin

Figma

Penpot

Classic to Block website