Can you Really build a WordPress Plugin with AI?
A walkthrough of my experiment building a WordPress plugin completely with AI. It’s made me a believer.
Haven’t we all been experimenting with all kinds of AI lately? I sure have, and the potential is really exciting overall.
But if you’re a WordPress product owner, then the question that is really burning in your brain is “Can I really build a WordPress plugin with AI?”
I wholly subscribe to the recent adage about AI usage that many have been saying:
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“AI is not going to replace humans,
Lots of people, not sure the source of this one
but humans who use AI will replace those that don’t.”
So I wanted to test this hypothesis a bit. I wanted to see if I could build something that I’ve never built or tried to build before completely from scratch with AI, and that it not only worked but it would be better than I would have done on my own, and completed quicker than I would have done on my own.
So here’s a quick walkthrough of me showing a plugin I’ve built that I’m calling “Posts Calendar View”. Watch the video, then keep reading below for links and my takeaways from the experience.
Can AI Build a WordPress Plugin? Absolutely.
If you want to see all the nitty gritty details of my whole interaction with chatGPT in building this plugin, you can review it in this public chat here:
If you’re interested in how I grab the user color scheme and apply those colors to the UI, here’s the GIST I made:
Here’s a few of my takeaways from the experience:
A beginner can do it, but it’s super basic
My prompt was extremely basic, I simply told it what I wanted the plugin to do:
“I need a plugin that will display all my posts in the WordPress admin in a calendar view.”
That’s a prompt many beginners could use. But they would then need the knowledge and/or confidence to copy/paste that code into a file, add the php extension, then either create a zip or FTP it up to their plugins folder. So all of that next part isn’t the easiest of things for an absolute beginner.
Nevertheless, they could do that in chatGPT and send that over to a basic WordPress developer and start running.
Knowing code and WordPress conventions make it far more useful
I haven’t done actual PHP or Javascript code in many years now. But I know my way around decently. When chatGPT gave me code, I knew what to do with it, where to put it, how to tweak it just enough to get the results I wanted. That makes all the difference.
And I learned all of those things through years of online documentation and trial and error. I really wonder what new developers will learn through AI. Will they learn faster and better than I did through my online docs and manual experiences?
This code isn’t shippable
I purposely haven’t pushed this to a public repo, because it’s ugly and messy, and not well documented and probably still full of security holes. Taking this from a functional prototype to an actual plugin that I’d be proud of on the WordPress Plugin Directory would require a real plugin dev to polish it a lot.
But that doesn’t mean some people won’t absolutely do this. I do fear for the future of plugins on the Plugin Directory, or the auditing task the Plugin Review Team has.
Balancing Professonalism with Execution
Lastly, even though I wouldn’t personally ship this code, I also wouldn’t want a developer or our internal StellarWP dev team to spend weeks polishing this. I think the ability for chatGPT to create functional plugins as prototypes should mean that real, solid, reliable products should be able to be shipped faster.
What are you Building with AI?
This is just my experience but I’d love to hear from you in the comments below what you’ve been building with AI.
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Anyone got any experience using Google Gemini? I asked it to develop a web app that could then be compiled as a WP plugin. But I ran into difficulties because it used REACT, which I don’t have any experience with. I’m not a coder or developer!
Hey Brian! I’m glad you swung by. I’m planning to write a follow-up to this. Everything with AI changes so quickly that this article already feels pretty quaint.
For your situation, I think your best bet is going to be leaning on something like loveable.dev or bolt.new. Those are both designed to give non-devs a more fully-functioning end result. But so far, in my opinion, they still are not as good as we’d like them to be for that use-case. Having a working knowledge of common dev practices I think is still pretty necessary in order to actually ship something functional.
Good luck though, I’d love to hear more about your journey. Feel free to reach out via my contact form: https://www.mattcromwell.com/ask-matt/
Hi, Matt. Do you know any tool as Bolt.new able to create WP plugins? Bolt only develops standalone React based softwares.
I’ve been experimenting with it. Jamie Marsland built Pootle Writer and Pootle Books with it. It’s powerful. So far though, for WordPress products with my dev knowledge, I’m having more success asking ChatGPT specific questions kind of one feature or function at a time, and collaborating with it via it’s Canvas.
Hi Eldes,
at this point I just asked specific questions to ChatGPT, but I read another article with the following setup:
Using VS Code as IDE and connect it with Cline (AI Agent). Within it you can connect your Claude account and get ready to go in VS Code. Maybe this is another shot for you to try out?
Good luck and let us know :)
Actually, Cursor.AI has opened up tons of new possibilities for me personally. A lot of my new “Connect” template was built straight from Cursor. For example, I had no idea how to pull in an RSS feed with Javascript. Cursor implemented it in the template in one try.
Check out the article and template here:
https://www.mattcromwell.com/connect-a-link-in-bio-template-for-github-pages/