[00:00:00] **Dustin:** On today's episode, we're going to talk about how we can unlock our content creation strategy with AI tools for our WordPress site right here on Your Website Engineer podcast episode number 536

Hello and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. I'm excited to be with you today because we're gonna be talking a little bit of tricks, a little bit strategy and how I've been using AI to generate some new content for yourwebsiteengineer.com. So we're gonna get to that in just a second.

I've got Four announcements that I want to share and a plugin. So the first announcement is all about GoDaddy retiring the MediaTemple brand. MediaTemple is one of the pillars of WordPress hosting. It was one of the first ones that was out there and it was a really cool, like hip brand and lots of people use MediaTemple.

Well, GoDaddy acquired the MediaTemple brand and they ran as separate entities for quite a while, and then recently it looks like GoDaddy is going to shut that brand down. And all folks that were on MediaTemple branded hosting are now being rolled over to [00:01:00] GoDaddy hosting without any action is needed or whatnot.

But I wanted to share that if you are using MediaTemple and maybe you're not a huge fan of GoDaddy or maybe want to try out different hosts. This would be a perfect opportunity to see what is happening in the WordPress space and what other hosting platforms are out there for dedicated WordPress hosts.

The other thing that I want to share today, it kind of goes along with this episode, but this is by the Human Made company. They are hosting their second AI virtual event. The first one was called AI for WordPress and that was hosted in May of 2023. This is the second edition called AI the Next Chapter and it will take place on September 14th at 10 a. m. Eastern.

It's an all day event and they've got a whole bunch of different speakers and talks that are going on. The first one will be Matt Mullenweg, the co founder of WordPress and CEO of Automatic, along with Tom Willman, who is the CEO of Human Made, and they're going to be talking about AI and the future of WordPress.

And so if today's episode gives you some ideas or trigger some oh, maybe I should be using a little bit more. A. I. This would be a [00:02:00] perfect day to just kind of sit back and watch these sessions take place. Now they will be recorded. They're available on YouTube and even the previous version, the A. I. For WordPress. The first event is on YouTube as well. And so if you're interested, I have a link in the show notes for the W. P. Tavern article where you can go over and watch those previous videos and you can see what will be happening on September 14th, 2023.

The third announcement today is about a LinkedIn post that I saw this week that was shared across the WordPress community. And this is from Jamie Marshland, and he is the founder of Pootle Press. Remember a few weeks ago, I pointed him out as someone cool to follow on Twitter, because he's creating on Twitter basically a snapshot of like, I created this at the block editor.

How did I do it? What blocks did I use? And he's leaving it up for people to guess like, Oh, I use the paragraph block in a right justify block and all these kinds of things. Well, he has a post now that's got a video. It's 14 minutes long and it is how he can recreate the tech crunch website using just WordPress and no plugins.

It is a fascinating watch. If [00:03:00] you want to see how you can use the WordPress, a new full site editing mode, how you can just see the differences and how, how he thinks through and uses different core blocks to build the TechCrunch website. So he's got two browsers side by side. It shows TechCrunch and it shows his dashboard and he's just working through it and it's a really neat video.

If you have 14 minutes, I highly recommend checking that out. There's a link to it in the show notes so you can get to it quickly and easily.

The last thing that I want to share with you today was a email message that came in about last week's episode, about the theme. json episode. And the question comes in from David, and David says, the value of a child theme is that the parent theme can continuously be updated by the theme designer, particularly providing security updates that may need to be applied to the original theme. If we are not using child themes, and do full site editing with block themes as you explained in this episode, does that negate being able to easily apply security updates to a theme?

That is a great question and I totally missed the boat there in not describing this and not [00:04:00] talking through it when we were talking on the episode about the theme. json file. But basically, basically, how it works is and how themes are built now with this new full site editing mode is. There is a style that CSS file in all of the, the layout pages.

So those are, those would be like your single page templates, your page templates, index, blank archive. All of those are just straight HTML files. There is no code in there. So there is nothing to really have a security update. It's basically laying out how blocks should be arranged and then they're relying on the core WordPress, which is providing all of the functionality and that would be what needs to be updated in order to stay secure.

So it's basically taking the onus off the theme developer. The theme developer is the one just creating the visuals, whether that just be with CSS or how blocks are rearranged. And there's, those are core blocks. Themes should not have custom blocks built in to their theme itself.

It should [00:05:00] strictly be the visuals of your site. And if there is a theme editor out there that maybe wants to create a custom block for their particular theme, I think that the best method there would be to have a separate plugin installed.

We see this a lot. We see with a lot with the Envato WordPress themes that we get that you can download in their WordPress theme that there's also a plugin that you can install. And the plugin kind of manages those updates and adds the extra functionality. So, I don't think that this is a perfect solution, David.

I don't think there's a hard and fast rule that says no functionality should be added to a theme. And I think as we continue to get into this best practices of how full site editing theme work, I think we'll get rid of that functionality and let that to be the plugins.

And then the plugins can be what are updated. And the structure of a full site editing theme is the style that CSS file. It has the template files, which are all HTML based.

There's no code. There's no dynamic code that could be outdated or be some sort of security threat could be passed in through an HTML entity. And then [00:06:00] there's also those theme.json files.

The theme can have a functions. php file, but those are going to be mainly to set up how to enqueue the styles, how to enqueue the different template directories and things like that. There shouldn't be much code per se in the. Functions dot php file. Now this is my answer as of September 2023. I don't know where we're going to run into this as we have more and more mainstream themes going to the full site editing route.

So I think if you are picking a theme from the WordPress repository, I feel like those had a good overview or they had somebody that looked at him and made sure that they were okay. And so I would have no problems copying those and duplicating those and creating those as our theme. So that's how I want to answer that today. Again, 2023 we'll see how things progress and we'll see if that advice is still accurate over the next couple of years.

Okay. I have a plugin to share with you today and it's called EmbedPress, and it is a plugin that's got 80, 000 active installs and it lets you engage with your users and add any type of interactive multimedia, such as videos, [00:07:00] images, post, audio, maps, documents, PDFs, and so much more to your WordPress site.

It says it can do 150 sources, which is an awful lot. And that's rich media embeds from different places. So think about putting a Google map in and being able to drag and move it around, or think about using a Google form and embedding a Google form onto your page. Now, a lot of these are built into WordPress, but this plugin has the ability to both it translates your content with multilingual plugins.

It also gives you extra setting. So if you upload a PDF, then you'll have settings on the right hand sidebar for your block to, to customize those in some sort of way. So I think that this is a good plugin.

If you feel like your media embeds are lacking a little bit, or you just don't like the way that it looks with the built in embed from WordPress that I think that this would be a good plugin search for EmbedPress or as always there's a link in the show notes for episode number five hundred and thirty six.

All right, today we're going to talk about chatGPT and how we can use it to create content, how we can use it to help our businesses, how we can [00:08:00] use it to just speed up the process of getting text on pages, whatever that may look like for your WordPress site.

Okay, let's talk about how I use chatGPT and I've been using it for the last few months or so, just trying to generate some content and help me to kind of lay things out and speed up my content creation. So like last week's episode, I knew I wanted to talk about theme.json and I just, I need a little help to gather information to help me understand it a little bit better so I can explain it in an audio form.

So the first thing that I said was chatGPT explained to me like I'm new to WordPress, what the theme.json file is. And luckily, the theme. json file is only in the full site editing themes. So I knew that if I didn't have to say like WordPress and full site editing themes, I knew that it could be pretty smart and figure it out together.

So it gave me this eight paragraph thing of what the theme. json is. And it basically gave me some examples and kind of explained to me what it was. And then I said, okay, now, great. Now give me a more technical description of what the theme. json file is. And it went through there and it.

It told me all about the different things that [00:09:00] it's good for, and I use those as bullet points for my episode last week. So I've been using it for generating and getting details about the topic that I've chosen for a WordPress podcast.

I've also used it in the past for creating scripts for my YouTube videos.

I asked it, can you create a super engaging YouTube script on how to use the WordPress full site editor to create a header and manage navigation? The video should be three minutes or less. Then it comes up with all the things that I could talk about in a video. And then I said, from that last script, please create a YouTube description and it comes up with all the descriptions of the points that were talked about in the previous outline.

So that's pretty cool.

I've also asked it for, I need 10 ideas for shows for a WordPress podcast. The show should be about 15 minutes in length with each idea would be three to four bullet points for each show. So then that comes up with top WordPress plugins of the year, mastering Gutenberg tips and tricks behind the scenes interviews with a WordPress theme developer It has a ton of different information.

So [00:10:00] I've I've used it to generate individual content, I've used it to generate a script that I could use to record a YouTube video. I use it to come up with ideas, I use it to take the transcript of each podcast episode and I said, can you take this and create a summary, a show notes of my podcast?

And then I can put that into the podcast show notes. And so it's making my life a lot easier and it is upping the value and, and making things more visible on the website, if you will. So I wanted to just to talk a little bit about that. Let's talk about how to set up chatgBT and we'll go through a quick bullet point that of course chat GBT came up with.

Let's first talk about how to set up chatGPT. You can visit chatGPT's page which is basically openAI.Com. There's a link in the show notes of course that you can get there. You can try chatGPT or you can sign up for a free account, they do have a paid plan. That's 20 a month.

I'm just using the free plan and I haven't run into any limitations so far, but I think that I'm starting to see enough value that 20 a month is just really peanuts to pay when it comes to like some how much time it's [00:11:00] actually saving me.

So I you can go to chatGBT you sign up and then basically you ask your question you hit submit and then you wait for a response So I basically would type I need 10 ideas for a show about WordPress and then you can continue to give it more information Like if I were to say this is an hour long show I need 15 items like it would just generate all that kind of stuff. And then what's cool is when you have an account, it saves all of these chats.

And so you can always go back and say, can you expand on this? Can you take topic one and can you expand on it? Can you give me more information? So that is how to generate some content with open AI.

Let's say you have, you've signed up for an account now and you are starting to build a brand new site, you can ask chatGPT to create a simple website outline for a small web development company that maybe consists of five pages. So you say, I have a web development company, create a website outline for my business consisting of five important pages I should include.

And then it would say like homepage, services page, about page, a portfolio page and blog page. And then it can say each of those pages provide an overview of your company, [00:12:00] including your mission statement, a brief description. It should have a call to action. It should have a contact with us or learn more to encourage visitors to engage in business.

So it's basically giving you some ideas like, okay. Remember this, put the stuff on these pages. Then you can also even like ask it, create a homepage for a web development company, write down the hero title, a tagline and a strong call to action. And it can generate that kind of stuff for you. If you are interested in looking for a specific type of theme, maybe you want to say recommend a simple and responsive WordPress theme that works well with bootstrap preferably a free option and then it can list all of those plugins or all of those things that are out there.

The other cool thing about chatGPT, which I think is one of the huge benefits that maybe we're not using that much is you can set a specific audience demographic and keep that in mind. You can say, chatGPT, I'm creating a WordPress consulting business who will focus on lawyers.

I need a call to action that will entice lawyers I want to have all my benefits that are geared towards lawyers. And then you can do this and it's [00:13:00] going to help you massage that content and it's going to help you come up with content in a language model that is going to entice lawyers and have them be the ones that are interested in your site.

The other thing is that you can change it to be in a simpler language.

So you could say, explain what a website domain is to an eighth grader and it will go in and it will tell you and it'll do explaining. I think I've used one in the past that was like, I don't understand this typescript error. Explain it to me like I'm a brand new developer. So it works well in getting an answer, and then if it's too complex and you can just ask it to make it simpler, explain it to me like I'm a third grader.

Explain it to me like I've never written a line of code in my life. These types of things you can do with chatGPT.

So some of the best practices with using ChatGPT, we want to make sure that we're avoiding plagiarism and duplicating content, like we want to make sure that we are using this for content generation. We're just not copying and pasting. It's made for us to get ideas. It's made for us to quickly get things in place like I use these outlines all the time, but I'm not copying them word for word, you [00:14:00] know, I'm pulling some from this outline.

I'm pulling some of this from my knowledge. I'm creating this outline myself and then I'm putting it all together to create unique brand new content. We want to make sure that we are looking for accuracy. That's one of the downfalls of chatGBT. ChatGBT is really good at saying something matter of factly, like it is a known fact, but it could be 100 percent wrong.

So you have to check and make sure things are right. You know, if I said something about tell me about a block theme that was created in 2013, like it would go out there and it would get me the information, even though block themes weren't created until 2021. So you have to double check and you have to make sure that your facts are accurate.

And then you want to monitor, you want to refine, you want to just continue to ask questions to chatGBT, use it kind of like a personal assistant. Like I don't quite get this, or I don't like this point. Can we add another one?

You also want to make sure that you're kind of monitoring and refining the A. I. Generated content again. We're not copying and pasting it where we're going to use parts of it. We're going to use it and change it into our own language. We're going to add images or we're going to add, you know, different things to make the [00:15:00] content ours.

We're going to use the content to help us. Maybe it's at SEO metadata to different posts, or maybe it's, I don't know what it could be. There's thousands of ideas that you can use chatGPT for. So I wanted to make sure that you have that idea that you have to make sure that we're not 100 percent copying and pasting, and we're making sure that what we are actually, putting on our sites or what we're saying with our mouth or what we are using to create a video that it is accurate and it is relevant. And we're just not reading whatever chatGPT says.

The call to action this week is to use chatGPT, so sign up for a free account if you don't have one, and use it to generate some type of content, whether that be a bunch of ideas for upcoming blog posts. Maybe it is for some sort of digital product like they could create a description for digital product.

They could help you update the products on your site to give a better description. You can get metadata for different things. I think one of the WordCamp US sessions had something about give me three promotional things that I could do on my site for the United States Labor [00:16:00] Day, which was coming up like a week after WordCamp US.

Or maybe you can say, I want to run some sort of Halloween promotion. Give me four ideas to run a Halloween promotion for my site that sells books or, you know, whatever. Just be very specific with your question to chatGBT and then refine it and then see how you can use ChatGBT to create content or make something better on your site.

I know for me, I'm taking my transcripts and using chatGPT to update show notes for old episodes. I'm kind of working backwards in the catalog as I have made some improvements to the way that the podcasts are coming through the feed.

And so I need to update 500 and some odd episodes to get all of that. So I'm like, while I'm doing that, I might as well use the power of chatGBT to go through and update the show notes to make sure they're accurate and they have all the links that are needed. So it's a long process and a long tedious thing.

But chat GBT actually kind of makes it fun because it's like here's the transcript and then I copy and paste it and then I get the results and then I will check and I use pieces and parts of it and then paste it in and then move on to the next one. So it's like you get to see this [00:17:00] robot kind of working for you.

So that's what I'm excited about when it comes to chatGBT. I'm excited about the conference thing that is happening next week again. That is A. I. The next chapter and they'll be exciting to see and watch some of those replays about how folks are using it across the WordPress space and until next week, go out there and use chatGPT for something. We'll talk again soon. Take care. Bye bye for more great WordPress information head on over to YourWebsiteEngineer.com.