In this episode of the Post Status Happiness Hour, host Michelle Frechette welcomes Brad Williams, Chief Executive Officer of Web Dev Studios, to discuss the new Theme Switcher Pro plugin. Brad introduces Theme Switcher Pro, a plugin designed to help WordPress users transition from the classic editor to the block editor (Gutenberg) without a complete site rebuild. They discuss the plugin’s features, including its ability to switch themes for specific posts or pages, and its benefits for businesses and developers. The episode concludes with a focus on community support and upcoming WordPress events.
Top Takeaways:
- Theme Switcher Pro Simplifies Testing and Switching Between WordPress Themes: Theme Switcher Pro is positioned as a powerful utility for developers and agencies to easily preview, switch, and test multiple WordPress themes on a live site without affecting the frontend user experience. It removes the friction from theme testing, making it safer and faster to compare themes, especially during redesigns or audits.
- Built Specifically for Agencies, Developers, and High-Volume Users: Brad Williams emphasized that Theme Switcher Pro is not just a hobby plugin—it’s designed for professional workflows. Agencies managing many client sites or developers constantly evaluating new themes are the target audience. Features are built with this high-usage context in mind, including the ability to bookmark themes, preview them privately, and manage theme stacks.
- Theme Switcher Pro Reflects Real-World Workflow Pain Points: The product emerged from Brad’s direct experience at WebDevStudios and feedback from others facing the same problem: managing and previewing themes across many sites was a repetitive, manual, and risky process. Theme Switcher Pro directly addresses these workflow inefficiencies and turns them into a smooth, controlled experience.
Mentioned In The Show:
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Transcript
Michelle Frechette 00:00:02 Welcome to Post Status Happiness Hour Live. I am here with my good friend Brad Williams from Web Dev Studios. We go way back. We go way back till.
Brad Williams 00:00:14 How far back do we go?
Michelle Frechette 00:00:15 We go back to my first WordCamp or one of my first WordCamps in Buffalo. When you bought wing hats, I think you were wearing giant wings on your head.
Brad Williams 00:00:26 That sounds like me.
Michelle Frechette 00:00:27 It does sound like you.
Brad Williams 00:00:29 Yeah. WordCamp Buffalo. I didn’t realize that was your first WordCamp. So that’s why.
Michelle Frechette 00:00:33 You took the train?
Brad Williams 00:00:35 I did, I took the train from Jersey. This was. I mean, this was over ten years ago, right?
Michelle Frechette 00:00:41 So, yeah, it definitely was.
Brad Williams 00:00:42 Yeah. Trains from Jersey all the way to Buffalo, which is, you know, the quickest ride you can imagine. And, but I will say it’s a beautiful ride. And I actually really enjoy trains. I like kind of just chilling when I travel. The opposite of my wife who absolutely hates trains. She just wants to get there. But I enjoyed it. It’s a very scenic view. Got there. I think we went right to the Anchor Bar and like, try to pound 50 original wings. And then I think we were at the speaker’s sponsor dinner shortly afterwards.
Michelle Frechette 00:01:06 I think you were. I think that sounds about right.
Brad Williams 00:01:08 That’s how you do Buffalo.
Michelle Frechette 00:01:10 That is exactly how you do Buffalo. Although I will say Anchor Bar may have originated them, but they don’t have the best wings. There are definitely better wings now in Buffalo.
Brad Williams 00:01:20 Those are fighting words. I’m in Philly, so I’ll stick to the cheesesteak debates. I can’t debate every type of food, but they were good.
Michelle Frechette 00:01:26 I do like cheesesteaks. I saw your most recent cheesesteak versus your son picture, and he has far outgrown the comparison too.
Brad Williams 00:01:34 Yeah, I had a little bit of a, I guess, a quick viral moment with measuring my my son with cheesesteaks when he was born. Every month I would line him up and, you know, month one, month two, all the way through one year and.
Michelle Frechette 00:01:46 He’s peaking in the background there.
Brad Williams 00:01:46 The second year anniversary. It kind of I was posting about it kind of took off, went viral real quick. So it’s funny because everybody in the WordPress community really remembers that because it was very, almost global for about a day, and then it was just gone. But, Yeah, the cheesesteak baby.
Michelle Frechette 00:02:01 He just poked his head in. He’s very tall.
Brad Williams 00:02:04 Did he?
Michelle Frechette 00:02:05 He did for a second. And then he closed the door.
Brad Williams 00:02:07 He wanted to put the live stream up on my TV and told him he needs to watch it, so.
Michelle Frechette 00:02:11 Oh, there you go. Perfect. That’s awesome. Well, we are here today because I got to see you demo something quickly for me in Arizona a few weeks ago, and not even two full weeks ago, but somewhere around there. Which is your theme switcher. And I was so intrigued. I’m like, hey, you got to come on the podcast and talk about it. I thought I’d be your first podcast talking about it, but, I wasn’t. You’ve got you’ve been making the rounds, but.
Brad Williams 00:02:36 On my media circuit, Michelle, you understand when I have something to talk about. Which, honestly, it’s kind of cool because, like, I’ve been around WordPress for a long time, like you and and I’ve seen kind of the media within WordPress. I was thinking about this the other day, like, come and go write like websites that were really instrumental, like WP Candy back in the day is gone, right? But like it ebbs and flows. But right now there’s so many podcasts, so many, you know, great newsletters. Sites talking about WordPress and like, not just fluff, like real legit information. Real good information. So it’s really from that perspective, it’s probably one of the best times to be releasing things, talking about things, or just talking about WordPress, because there’s so many awesome channels to do that right now.
Michelle Frechette 00:03:16 There really are.
Brad Williams 00:03:16 Is being one of them, of course.
Michelle Frechette 00:03:17 Absolutely. I mean, I love being in charge of one of those channels because I have a lot of fun talking to people who are really doing amazing things in the WordPress scene. And, the idea behind this plugin, like, completely blew me away. I love that you can be so granular with how you use it. I realize I’m talking like I’m not trying to steal your thunder, so I’m going to let you tell them.
Brad Williams 00:03:41 Please keep going, Michelle.
Michelle Frechette 00:03:44 But the idea that you can I mean, when I heard things, which I thought, well, I could switch from, you know, XYZ for 2025 theme to like 2021 theme really easily, but it does way more than that. Which is why it’s a premium plugin actually, and it can do some pretty amazing things. I think some of the nicest, maybe nice. That’s a weird word to use. One of the most intriguing things you can do with it is perhaps have a different theme for your blog than you do for your site, but also like cool for landing pages and things like that. So I’m super excited about that. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about what the impetus behind it. And then we are going to demo it while we being you are going to demo it.
Brad Williams 00:04:25 Live demos I love em.
Michelle Frechette 00:04:27 Yeah. We gotta love the live demos. That’s right. So tell us a little bit about it.
Brad Williams 00:04:30 Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate that, Michelle. So, you know, Theme Switcher Pro, it’s our latest, plugin from Web Dev Studios. So we’ve been in the WordPress industry for a long time working on, you know, building sites a lot. A lot of the sites and projects we work on are more complex size, larger, many enterprise clients, larger brands you may be familiar with. So we have a history of really solving complex challenges. Right? And that’s one thing we’ve really been known for within the community is doing just that. And one of the challenges that, you know, have come up. You know, again and again, especially the last few years, is the idea of. You know, there is a lot of websites out there still running, you know. Classic WordPress running, classic editor, the Wysiwyg editor, and they by and large, maybe really enjoy their sites. Maybe they don’t, but they’re kind of stuck, right? And they don’t know. There’s not a clear path to get to the block editor or the Gutenberg block editor, without really completely rebuilding your website. And that is a challenge for a lot of people, especially in the last couple of years, as budgets have gotten tighter. And everyone’s really scrutinizing spend and where it’s going and, you know, wanting to get more for less. Right? Which, you know, you can understand as a business. That makes sense. but the idea of saying, okay, we want to redesign and rebuild our website because we want a new way to create content using the block editor. That’s a hard sell. You know, up the chain of command. That’s a hard sell to executives, right? So, you know, we started kind of thinking about the opportunities, walking in the door much harder to get those rebuild projects landed in the past few years.
Brad Williams 00:05:59 So we started really thinking, well, what can we do? Like, is there a way we could do this and start chipping away at it, you know, maybe extend this out? So it’s not a traditional rebuild of a project, relaunch of a website, but we systematically start replacing sections of a website. And we started digging in from an engineering standpoint to see how, how doable that was. You know, with the block editor, full support of the block editor, which really adds some complexities. And we discovered it. It is doable and we were confident we could make it happen. And so we started rolling out and building this technology and implementing it, implementing it on client websites, with great success. You know, they really loved it, what it was doing. So, and started demoing it to some friends and insiders and a couple hosting companies, and all of them said, nobody’s doing this. You need to productize it. You need to build this out so you can sell it in a way, and make it more of a product versus a custom integration across the board. So that’s exactly what we did. And again, the goal of this, or at least the initial goal, was to help people transition from classic WordPress classic editor to blocks in more to iterative fashion. So rather than trying to get maybe a $100,000 approved to rebuild a website in 4 to 6 months, you know, can we get $5000 a month for 12 months, maybe $10,000 a month for 12 to 18 month? And we start selectively replacing templates across your site with a new block based theme. We have had clients that have come to us and said, you know, 95% of our traffic is on our article pages because they’re media sites. So people are going directly to those pages. They’re not necessarily hitting the homepage. Guess what? We swapped out just that page and made it a block based page. So now not only is it more performant quicker, it allows our entire editorial team. It gives them the full power of blocks and patterns. So the content they’re producing is so much better. And when people start to see the block editor and especially patterns like it’s just this light bulb moment of that’s exactly what we want.
Brad Williams 00:07:48 How do we get there? So now we have that solution. And it’s not just for us for Web Dev Studios, right? We built this in a way, and I and I firmly believe that this is a tool that other freelancers, builders, agencies should be looking at because it can allow them to bring additional options to their clients. So maybe again, their client doesn’t want to redesign their website. Great. Bring this tool to your client and say, let’s chip away at it. Let’s start iteratively upgrading your website with maybe the end goal being if the end goal is to retire your old website, then when you get done with kind of implementing your your new theme across all of your various pages, then you turn off Theme Switcher Pro and activate your new theme fully and you’re done. Right. So it’s a tool that could be removed if that’s the goal, or it’s a tool that could also stay there. And I’m sure we’ll get into that with like landing pages and other things.
Michelle Frechette 00:08:31 So yeah. Absolutely. Very cool. Well, do you want me to bring it up and you can start to show us a little bit about what it does?
Brad Williams 00:08:36 Let’s start to show it. Actually, can I do what happens if I do this. Cool. switches to my other one. That’s what I was hoping.
Michelle Frechette 00:08:43 Okay, cool.
Brad Williams 00:08:43 All right. So, I could show a couple of different demos. I like showing more real world demos, right? Like, this is the web. Sorry. This is the Web Dev Studios dev site lot going on here. But it’s essentially a clone of our, of our live website. This is all classic WordPress. We’ve struggled like everyone to, you know, cobbler’s kids and shoes and all that stuff, right? But having the time and focus to not just rebuild and redesign our website, but upgrade it to more modern WordPress. Right? So hey, this is the tool we’re going to start using and are starting to use. So real simply, I have Theme Switcher Pro installed here.
Brad Williams 00:09:17 Again, it’s a plugin. it’s activated. It automatically detects. So it has a UI. Of course. It automatically detects my detects all my custom post types that I have registered. Of course it’s going to default to it’s, you know, select your theme. It’s going to default to whatever is active by default, as you’d expect. It’s got my front page settings. If I want to swap out my home page for something else. Archive settings. So things like taxonomies, categories, tags, you know those archives you can change out. Classic editors. This is the demo I really want to show here. So the idea of overwriting the WordPress classic editor with the block editor, and then some debug stuff. So real quick, a simple example if you have the classic editor installed, this is a separate plugin. If you have that installed, it forces the classic editor and it does not allow you to override that because that’s exactly what that plugin is meant to do. So by default that’s we respect that. But if we want to override it, which in this case we do, we go ahead and say, I’m going to override the classic editor. And I’m going to use, you know, whatever theme I want to use to do that. So I’ll just go ahead and save it. And now remember this is all classic editor. So any, any content, anything I look on this website is going to be Wysiwyg. So if I go to add a new page it’s it’s using Wysiwyg. It’s using old school WordPress. nothing’s changing yet. Right? Now what I want to do is I want to start using blocks and patterns. So, in this case, again, I’m on a single page, a single piece of content. I’m not making a global rule. I scroll down here and you’ll see Themes Switcher Pro settings. I can switch this. So any theme I have in my themes directory, one of these is going to be active of course, but anything that’s in there is going to show up. In this case I have my WVS one which is our block base theme. I guess you can’t see my dropdown on the screen, but I selected one. And then as soon as I save it, this is, this is where the magic happens, right? So fingers crossed live demo and all. But yeah, as soon as I save it, it knows I’ve just switched.
Michelle Frechette 00:11:05 There you go look at that.
Brad Williams 00:11:06 And now we’re in blocks. And this is the power. This is the light bulb moment I like to show people. Because if you were stuck in the classic editor, this is your solution. This is your path forward. So as soon as I. This is not just like the front end. This is loading the entire theme in the back end. And that was one of the hardest technical challenges of this plugin is if you’re running a Gutenberg theme and you go to create a new piece of content, content, all of those assets from that theme, everything needs to load in the back end, so you can use it to build out your blocks, your patterns, your pages that come with, you know, come with that theme. It all has to load and be available. And that’s where the challenge was. It’s not just saying, hey, run this theme and said that theme. There’s a lot more to it to say, hey, we need to load this theme. So it’s actually fully running on the back end as it would if it were a fully activated, like a traditional theme. But now I have all the patterns. We don’t have a ton in here. We’re still working on them, but you can see all the patterns that come with the theme. If you’re using Ollie, if you’re using Aster or something, the patterns are going to be in there that come with it. And then, you know, real quickly I can just start building, building out a block page, throwing in patterns. Let’s go ahead and, let’s just publish it and take a look, and then I’ll quickly show, after there’s a couple other options with like another premium theme. So obviously very rough example. But, the way we set up our block themes is and do this transition is we mimic the header and footer of the classic site onto the new block based theme.
Brad Williams 00:12:31 So the header and footer is identical. The only thing that changes is the content between which is now powered by blocks, as you can see. So, when the rest of this website is all very, very much classic, classic WordPress. except for this one single page that I just created. And that to me is just it blows my mind that we can get so granular and say one page or one post or whatever it might be. Or you can go more global and say every single post on my website is going to run this new theme or every, you know, post or every post in the news category is going to run this one theme. So it’s, you know, the possibilities when you can get into it, really start to expand because not only can you switch out stuff, but you can use it for other things like you mentioned landing pages, maybe LMS, e-commerce, things like that. So really, really powerful really quickly.
Michelle Frechette 00:13:19 Absolutely. Now we have a couple comments I’ll bring up real quick.
Michelle Frechette 00:13:22 So, Cami says, this is so cool, Brad. Yeah.
Brad Williams: Cami! Go, Raiders!
Michelle Frechette: Matt says, I’ve been seeing this guy all over the place.
Brad Williams 00:13:30 I’m a man on the streets, Matt, and that is one of my favorite rolls in this company. Man on the streets. I always joke with my wife, April. That’s really my unofficial title. And she thinks I’m something so.
Michelle Frechette 00:13:39 I’m the streets. So Dan is asking, what if your classic theme has a lot of custom fields?
Brad Williams 00:13:47 Yep. Yeah. Good question. So, now it depends. Right? So is that how were you registering the fields? Right? Is it all coming kind of baked within the theme, or is it have you integrated with like ACF or, you know, some other tool CNB2 or something like that? If it’s all baked in the theme, it will all be available when you switch the theme. We’ve also got a way where you can because some themes have options, of course. You can switch the theme on the back end just to go into those theme options, configure however you want and then switch it back if it’s not your primary theme.
Brad Williams 00:14:14 So it does allow that kind of flexibility. If things are registered in a plugin, and you switch the theme, the theme needs to be aware of, like how you’re using it, right? So that’s going to be part of your build out, whether it’s ingesting that via blocks or patterns, or if you’re building custom templates within your theme that knows what to do with that data, but you’re going to have to kind of inform the new templates what that data is in some way. Right? It’s it’s not going to just know, hey, this is a piece of pricing metadata that was added, without some context and kind of making that connection. So a little bit of work that you probably need to do there, but nothing, you know, nothing crazy. And honestly, most of it, if not all of it could be done through the UIs of, of the two tools. So, Yeah. That’s awesome. I’d love to show another quick example to when we have a second.
Michelle Frechette 00:14:57 Let me show Cami’s question. It’s the same question I asked you back in Arizona’s. Does it work with Page Builders? Can you use it with like, Beaver Builder and, you know, Elementor and things like that?
Brad Williams 00:15:06 It absolutely does. So we’ve tested with the most popular page builders, Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder. Just a few. We have a compatibility list on our website, that we’re making sure we really update it. ThemeSwitcher.com, by the way, is the website. We’re making sure we keep that update because that’s the number one thing. Is, is it going to work with this? Is it going to work with that? By and large, if things are doing if, if, if a plugin or service works with WordPress and using kind of what’s built in the WordPress, it works. A good example is Lifter LMS. Just I was on the LMS Cast with Chris talking about it, and we did some testing on both sides and and the way Lifter works, it creates pages. when you install and configure the plugin and then those pages inject the Lifter content into, into those pages via blocks or whatever method you want to use.
Brad Williams 00:15:51 So out of the box it works because their pages, right? Theme Switcher works with core WordPress for content, for custom post types, for taxonomies. The areas that you might need some additional support or customization, or if themes are coming with really specific or unique templates, things that aren’t really, you know, they’re doing things a little bit differently and more advanced. Those are the ones that want to do more thorough testing, but by and large, it works really, really well. We can’t guarantee it works on every theme ever made. But if you’re building themes the WordPress way and you’re following the standards, it works.
Michelle Frechette 00:16:21 Can you go back to the, the settings because you just mentioned post custom post types? Yeah. And Cami had that question. Can you show her where that setting was again?
Brad Williams 00:16:31 Yeah. So in the settings I’m in the Theme Switcher Pro. The first tab is post type. So in this example we have a number of custom post types registered. So it recognizes all of them like our books is a press type, press releases, services you know. And again this is our live website content. Team members custom post type. So maybe I want to use a different theme for my team members. I could switch it just for that post type. Now these are global rules. So if I switch it, it’s going to switch every post, every page over and I’ll switch over to I can demo that a little bit better on this setup. So this is a local host setup. But in this case I have a lot of different themes running and a lot of different conditions. But what I’d like to show is post. Right. So just to kind of show you where we’re at at 2025 is our active theme. I have a number of other themes available. and when I go, let’s go ahead and make a global rule. So let’s say, you know what, I want all of my posts to run the beautiful 2023. I know everyone loves that one because it has that really big green button, so I’ll save it. The home page is running Astra, right? So that’s different.
Brad Williams 00:17:30 this landing page is running Ollie. We can kind of go through how these work in a second. The sample page is default. This is 2025. Now remember I set it globally. So every single post, single post is now running 2023 which we see right here. And we should hopefully see there. It is our beautiful green button. And now it’s crossed every single post. The other thing I I’d like to mention is this was built by devs for devs. So while we do have these global and these various settings in the UI, this can all be controlled via code and you can get really granular. So you can tap into most WordPress conditionals directly via code to to create theme switching conditionals. Good example. A fun example that we’ve been talking about internally, and we’ll probably do an example next month. I like scary movies. Next month there’s a Friday the 13th, so you could set a conditional says on Friday the 13th, anytime there’s a Friday the 13th, run this theme on maybe just on this section or this post, or this page, or maybe across the whole website, just for fun.
Brad Williams 00:18:27 So you can get granular. You can say, you know, we launch this for a client and they wanted to use, you know, that client I mentioned on the single post, we basically did a snapshot in time. So all posts from the date we set going forward use the new theme and the new block based template and then all posts prior to that. We’re on the classic editor and kind of locked in. They could still modify that content, but they didn’t really need to. So we kind of put a line in the sand of when the new stuff is is started and the old stuff stays. Again, right through code, we can track it through Git Commits and just make sure that somebody doesn’t accidentally mess up the settings. But of course the UI works as well. But code, you can take it way further.
Michelle Frechette 00:19:03 This would have been really helpful that year that you changed your entire website for or for, April Fool’s Day, wouldn’t it?
Brad Williams 00:19:10 April Fool’s talk like a pirate. I mean, the possibilities are endless people. Like, we could we could just switch out every single day if we want, like, you know.
Michelle Frechette00:19:17 Yeah.
Brad Williams 00:19:18 Obviously you got to be careful, right? This is you put this on production. And I think these are cool examples. They’re probably not. That’s not really a use case, a real use case. But maybe maybe someone will have some fun just on their blog. Right? So.
Michelle Frechette 00:19:29 I mean, maybe you want to look like Space Jam tomorrow. Isn’t that the one that’s, like, so old?
Brad Williams 00:19:33 Maybe. I mean, the, you know, some other use cases. We have a client that’s using this just for landing pages. Their site’s fine, they like their site, but they wanted to get they want to start using block based content patterns and some, a different theme that we helped them design, develop so they could just rapidly pump out landing pages and there and there sites classic editor. Right. So we built out a new theme with them, and they’re using this just to produce new landing pages.
Brad Williams 00:19:55 And what used to take a week or two because they’d get all the copy in there and get everything great, but then a developer would have to come in and tighten up the code, get alignment right on images. You know how it is with the Wysiwyg editor. Now they’re doing it. They’re publishing it literally takes them a matter of hours and zero developer support. So when marketing teams start to understand again the power of blocks, and what it can do, and patterns and reusable components and how quickly that can help escalate their marketing initiatives online. Again, another kind of light bulb moment of, hey, we don’t have to flip everything upside down to start doing something more modern. We can use a tool like Theme Switcher Pro to start doing that. And then if we want to go all in and replace our site down the road, we can. But literally on your classic sites, you could install this plugin, install all of your some other theme, and create content within, you know, a minute or two and a block based on an old website.
Brad Williams 00:20:41 So in my mind, this is how we can get people to stay with WordPress and continue to use WordPress. We need to get them on the block editor because the old experience is outdated. It’s clunky, it’s frustrating, and it and it needs to go. And if we don’t. People on the classic legacy, many of them, especially businesses, are at a kind of a reflection point of what direction they want to go. We want them to stay on WordPress, all of us. Right? I would hope that’s listening to this show. So I firmly believe the more people can get on the block, it is the better chance we have to keep them on WordPress long term and continue to grow the, the project and the usage. So I’m really excited about this tool because I just think it’s another tool that, that can be in all of our tool belts that we can help, you know, further that adoption.
Michelle Frechette 00:21:23 I think I think you have a new customer. Cami says she has so many clients to switch over.
Brad Williams 00:21:27 Cami is great. We had a fun time at a Press Conference Meeting.
Michelle Frechette: She’s fantastic.
Brad Williams: And she’s a diehard like Raiders fan. I’m very jealous because she saw Bo Jackson playing the day and he’s like.
Michelle Frechette 00:21:35 Oh wow.
Brad Williams 00:21:36 One of my heroes. So, yeah, we bonded a lot, didn’t we?
Michelle Frechette 00:21:40 Is he the one that played baseball for a little while, too?
Brad Williams 00:21:42 Yeah, baseball and football. He’s the first one to do it.
Michelle Frechette 00:21:45 Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, yeah. She says go. She says, go Raiders!
Brad Williams 00:21:49 This is the year, Cami. I can feel it.
Michelle Frechette 00:21:51 It’s coming, it’s coming. Okay, so.
Brad Williams 00:21:53 It’s been like 20 years now.
Michelle Frechette 00:21:54 But I interrupted you before and you were going to show something else that was, a specific use case I think might have been landing pages, I don’t remember. I don’t know if you remember it.
Brad Williams 00:22:07 Yeah. I mean, I’m happy to show off anything. I think also, the home page is another biggie, right? Like, I and I think showing this example too, because the other thing that I showed from classic to, to blocks is great, but I love when you can bring in a lot of patterns and stuff. So again, this is a 20. This is an example of block to block right. This is running 2025 which is a block based theme. You know, so if we wanted to do a new landing page and I, I’m a big fan of Ollie because just because it ships with some really beautiful patterns, elegant layouts, very accessible, very easy to use. So I’ll switch it over to Ollie and we’ll go ahead and publish it. So again, it’s it’s going to flip. If you watch closely, you can see the font change just a little bit on the title. We are now running Ollie. So, as soon as we go into those patterns, you know, we go into Ollie, like, again. Ollie just has awesome patterns out of the box. Start building out, you know, a nice feature list. Let’s get a little grid here, some of this. And of course, you always need a real clear call to action. And then the other thing I like to do, which is just me, me in particular, is I like to switch my template to not have a title, full width, no title. Save it, publish it again. This is a 2025 website. I’ve got to remind people because it very quickly does not look like that. Sorry I flipped over. So as soon as I publish it, you know, this is I just put this is a 2025 website and I just put together this awesome landing page as we’re talking here in a matter of 60 seconds, you know, so and again, you know, home page is Astro. What do we set our single post to? 2023. You know, it’s like a sample page goes back to the default. So you can just, you know, the use cases really are limitless. And when you start to play around with it, it’s just fun. A/B testing is an option. You know. Yeah. You know, running it for different features, you know, rather than having to do subdomains or maybe be forced into multi-site. You can run, you know, a WooCommerce theme for WooCommerce where it’s actively testing WooCommerce. It’s a good question.
Brad Williams 00:23:59 We get it by and large works pretty well out of the box, but there’s definitely some more tightening we can do so before we call officially compatible. We’re going to be working on that, but we expect that to be fully compatible within the next release or two, probably in within a few weeks. So, because, you know, that’s another great use case. Hey, I want to use one of these awesome WooCommerce themes off the shelf, but I don’t want to replace my entire website theme, right? Cool. Just replace the theme running WooCommerce and the WooCommerce pages and sections. So yeah, it’s fun to see what I’m anxious to see what people think. There is an educational component to this, which is why I’m on my media tour. Because people need to be aware it’s out there and what it does. And it’s not just a dev tool. This is something we are actively running on production. We’re actively using, even on WordPress VIP websites. It’s being ran at scale right now.
Michelle Frechette 00:24:46 So I can see this really being useful to for say like maybe I maybe my blog. I like the side panel, I like all that stuff, but I maybe want to have video pages and I want those to be full width. And so I’m going to bring something else in for that. And I think that’s really like you said, the possibilities are really endless.
Brad Williams 00:25:03 We got a couple videos too, if you want to check them out. Trying to make kind of short and sweet couple minute like, here’s, you know, a video and action item. Hey, nice little banner we got there ready to go.
Michelle Frechette: You like that?
Brad Williams: Yeah, I like that, Michelle. I do.
Michelle Frechette 00:25:13 Tell you what.
Brad Williams 00:25:15 Do like that.
Michelle Frechette 00:25:17 I try.
Brad Williams 00:25:18 Yeah, but if anyone out there is interested in testing the tires, you know, kicking the tires. Want to test it out? Feel free to reach out. I’m happy to, to share out some copies. I’ve been doing some demos, too. So if anybody would like a one on one demo shoot me a DM. I think there’s a lot of questions, you know, just people want to explore. It’s also it is premium to your point. And that was that was a very calculated decision. This is a powerful tool. This is a tool that brings some value to either your website or your client’s websites, and we want to make sure that we can also put our best foot forward on the support standpoint. And to do that. You know, it’s got to be really on the premium side. So there could be opportunities down the road, which is why I put that pro name on there, you know.
Michelle Frechette 00:25:57 Yep.
Brad Williams 00:25:58 But but for now it is a premium tool. We do have a.
Michelle Frechette 00:26:01 It doesn’t really.
Brad Williams 00:26:02 30 day money back no questions asked. That way if for some reason your situation doesn’t work or you’re just not sure, you know, we’ll make it right, so.
Michelle Frechette 00:26:10 It really doesn’t feel like something that would have a light version, right? Like, so like what would you do as a light version? Do you really want this to have the full power.
Brad Williams 00:26:19 Only one theme with the light version.
Michelle Frechette 00:26:22 That would be weird.
Michelle Frechette 00:26:25 Yeah, I agree, I think and I think it’s well worth, worth the money. So we have some, some comments. Are you ready to take me for for me to take this off the screen where you want to show?
Brad Williams: Absolutely.
Michelle Frechette: Okay. So it’s just a little easier to bring the comments up here. So, Dan, Dan says love it. I can see how things could get complex with brand changes and new navigation or significant global typographic differences between the legacy and new themes. What’s the best way to deal with that?
Brad Williams 00:26:49 Yeah, no, that’s a fair point because you don’t want. You know, you need to be careful, right? You don’t want to you don’t want to jar. You don’t want a bad experience for your visitors on your website. That’s the number one thing, right? So if someone’s on your website and they click to a section, you’re about page and it feels like they left the website, but they didn’t, that is a bad, bad experience. So that’s why we what we do is we, we mimic the header footer now keeping them in sync. That is a challenge. You’re right. Because it’s two separate code bases. We don’t have a you know, we’re not basically syncing the the headers between the two themes. That could get a little tricky and, you know, could introduce bugs automatically rather than, something we’re able to catch manually. So I think it’s more of a conscious decision. You could build out a system that could do that. And we’ve built stuff like that for clients where it’s like a shared header, and that way it’s one code base, so there’s ways to do it, but we’re basically just mimicking the code and doing our best to keep it in sync with, again, the ultimate goal of for our clients and ultimately our website over time to transition fully to the new theme and then sunset and remove deactivate the legacy theme and fully activate that block theme across the whole website.
Michelle Frechette 00:27:53 So it looks like you’ve got a fan boy here.
Brad Williams 00:27:56 Oh, boy. So this guy, Mr. Lego, sir, he’s actually my neighbor and he does a lot of live streams and I like to log on to his and just, you know, mess with him a little bit, so.
Michelle Frechette 00:28:08 That’s awesome. My mother asked me last night how many Lego sets have you done? And I said, I don’t know, about 25. I counted them this morning. 43. I’m up to 43.
Brad Williams 00:28:15 You would like his his. He built a city. So his basement is from like from the Lego movie. Like you go down there and it’s this massive city. It’s. And it’s all lit up because you’ve got the LED sets. It’s cool.
Michelle Frechette 00:28:25 I need to see that. So Brian Henry says he wants I wanted something like this for affiliates. The idea was to have one WooCommerce store, but affiliates with theme to their style. For example, multiple domains, front ends for one store seems like an interesting use case.
Brad Williams 00:28:40 Absolutely. It could be. Yeah. Someone asked me, like, could you go from blocks to classic? I was like, yeah, you could, you shouldn’t. But you could.
Michelle Frechette 00:28:48 I mean, technically you could. But why?
Brad Williams 00:28:51 If your a psychopath you could.I guess you could go that direction.
Michelle Frechette 00:28:53 I like that. And he says 299 or free for us in this chat.
Brad Williams 00:28:57 Yeah. Brian reach out man. Like I’m a big believer in people in the community. You know, like if, if, if you have a good product and and you stand behind and you have a good team and it’s it’s value, giving out a few free copies is not is not killing the business of breaking the bank. Right. It’s like I want to get it out in the hands of people because I, I think the at least from us, I think the idea of getting it in the more agency and freelancer hands that they can bring to their clients is as intriguing, if not more, than just selling the product directly ourselves or only using it for our clients.
Brad Williams 00:29:24 I’m really anxious to kind of build a, you know, an ecosystem around this in a sense. And like I said, it’s another tool in, you know, the developers or, you know, webmaster, if you will, tool belt that they can go to their client and say, hey, we have an option. It’s not just rebuild from the ground up like this could get you some more work starting today. And you bring these, you know. We’re always looking for ways we can bring more services and stuff to our clients and sell them. Here’s one. If they’re on classic, bring this to them. Say, hey, we could take Ollie and start producing stuff today. Let’s go.
Michelle Frechette 00:29:54 Now I have a site that is on older Divi that is completely built with shortcodes. Is it going to work with that, or am I still going to have to do a little extra work to make it work?
Brad Williams 00:30:05 Well, it depends. Where codes are coming from. Is the biggie like, are they coming from the theme then no it’s.
Michelle Frechette 00:30:10 They are.
Brad Williams 00:30:10 It will the shortcode won’t know what to do because that that logic is in the other theme. Now there is a plugin that we have used recently. I’ll have to dig it up. I’ll get on the Post Status Slack. I’m blanking on the name, but what it does is it it goes through your site where there’s shortcode. You can set what shortcode and it goes through anywhere that short codes and use and renders it and then resaves it back as the rendered code. So it basically like kind of eliminates the shortcode.
Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Nice.
Brian Williams: Where it makes sense. So that could be an option where you could run that through because the shortcode is rendering something right from from Divi or whatever, so it could render it. And then now you have the HTML code within the content. So when you port it over it would work.
Michelle Frechette 00:30:49 Oh sweet.
Brad Williams 00:30:49 And you would probably it would, it would port over like a classic. That classic block.
Michelle Frechette 00:30:54 And I love that. Nice. Well we’ll talk later then because I want to test this out for you and and write about it.
Brad Williams 00:31:01 Yeah, that’s the more edge case use cases. I’m on an old version. I’m trying to do that, you know, the better, right? So that’s another reason why we’re really trying to get this in as many hands as possible early, because there are going to be some edge cases that we want to fully support that we haven’t yet come across, and that’s just going to come with further adoption and getting feedback. So.
Michelle Frechette 00:31:18 Now do you recommend people do this with a live site or in in staging or both.
Brad Williams 00:31:24 I highly recommend you do it live around 4:45 p.m. on a Friday.
Michelle Frechette 00:31:28 On a Friday. Right.
Brad Williams 00:31:29 Max experience. Max. I don’t know, Max exposure. I don’t know.
Michelle Frechette 00:31:33 Especially. If you’re on vacation the next week.
Brad Williams 00:31:36 Yeah. I mean, as with anything. Test it out, right? Like, once you’ve got it tested on your tests in a proper staging environment, right? Make sure staging is as close to production in terms of code and content doesn’t always need to be exactly in sync, but code needs to be in sync. So it’s a proper test. And if it’s working in production or in staging, push it up to production. In a way, you go, it’s not going to override anything until you tell it to. It’s not running anything until you tell it to. Even on activation, everything just keeps running the way it is. But you can start selectively testing. Just test one page. Let’s create one page, you know, before you start creating global rules. But of course, with everything, you know, tests before you go to production. But once it’s on prod and you’ve already tested in a way, you go and you just start creating content with whatever theme you decide you want to run.
Michelle Frechette 00:32:17 That’s awesome. Anybody else have more questions? This is your opportunity because when I let him go, he’s going to go have cheesesteak probably for dinner.
Brad Williams 00:32:27 Oh man. You know I don’t have as many cheesesteaks as I used to, but that does sound good.
Michelle Frechette 00:32:33 I don’t mean I don’t eat as many garbage places people would think we do in Rochester either but.
Brad Williams 00:32:38 You know what the other thing I had when I left, when I left Buffalo, you mentioned the wings. When I left, I had the the beef on weck. Is that what it’s called?
Michelle Frechette 00:32:45 Beef on weck is really good. Yeah. So it’s it’s kummelweck roll. So it’s got the caraway seeds, the rye seeds and.
Brad Williams 00:32:52 Just dipped it right in the, the juice.
Michelle Frechette 00:32:54 And. Yep.
Brad Williams 00:32:56 Picked up a couple of those and got back on the item on the train. I remember because they were like that’s the other place you have to go in Buffalo. So so I hit it on the way out. So if you’re ever going to an event, I mean, it’s all about the local food, you know, go there and eat. Yeah. That’s what I like to do.
Michelle Frechette 00:33:08 Come to Rochester, try a garbage plate. Go to Philly and have a cheesesteak. Yeah. Good stuff. I mean, none of it is healthy, but you don’t go to another city to eat healthy. You go to try.
Brad Williams 00:33:19 Nah.You go to try the local cuisine, which is not healthy at all.
Michelle Frechette 00:33:22 Never. Almost never. Almost never. Exactly. That’s awesome. So, I’ll put it up one more time so y’all can see it. If you are interested in more information, it is ThemeSwitcher.com. If you are in Post Status, you can always DM Brad. He’s pretty good about getting back to you and and all that kind of stuff. He’s usually in there. If you’re somebody who has Slack open all the time, you’ll hear the notifications and eventually turn to them, right? That’s what I always do. Which is awesome. Anything else you’d like to add today, Brad?
Brad Williams 00:33:55 Anything at all? Let’s see. No, I mean, look, I, I just got back from Press conf. You mentioned Michelle. We were there. Obviously a lot of people were there, a lot of really familiar faces in the WordPress industry and, and a lot of new faces that I had met, which is always great too. But, you know, going to an event like that that’s focused on, like the business of WordPress and just having kind of open and raw conversations like that’s a I guess that we need more of that, right? Like, I just as a community, just put it out there in the WordPress, like getting together in person, having face time goes a long, long way.
Michelle Frechette 00:34:29 It really does.
Brad Williams 00:34:30 Even when things aren’t going your way, even when there’s, you know, the outlook and everything is scary right now. Like we’re all going through this together. And the great thing about the WordPress community is we all naturally tend to help each other. So, and we always have and I feel like it’s just that’s one thing that truly does set us apart, that I just have not seen in other industries, industries, especially when you start getting into. We’re talking billions of dollars industry here, right? And we’re still, by and large, pretty friendly I think most of us. Right. So just important to remember that and I hope that we can start getting more events. I hope we can start getting more FaceTime and less of the, the craziness online and negativity. Let’s get back to positivity. I know by and large, most of the people in this community, are very positive people doing amazing things. So let’s get back to that. That was a lot of fun.
Michelle Frechette 00:35:20 It was I mean, I got laid off in February from my full time job. Of course, I work at Post Status and I do get paid for that. It’s not a voluntary position. But it isn’t a full time get paid what I was getting paid before position either. But I will say that by and large, so many people in WordPress have reached out to me to say, can they connect me to somebody? Hey, I found this job you should apply to. and I’m sponsored to go to War Camp Europe because people want to make sure that I’m in places like that. So I’m very happy with this community as well. I have some exciting things happening in the next couple of weeks I can’t quite talk about yet, but, people will will learn about very soon. Some things that are happening for me and some new sites that I’m going to be launching. So absolutely, this community is it’s kick ass. I’m telling you, it’s pretty awessome.
Brad Williams 00:36:04 And if you need help, like ask, reach out like.
Michelle Frechette 00:36:07 Yeah, exactly.
Brad Williams 00:36:08 I feel like everyone is very, very welcoming. Like, if you have a challenge, you have a problem. You have a, anything like going to Post Status. There is amazing information being dropped in there on almost a daily basis. I just got to just look and interact with people.
Michelle Frechette 00:36:21 The the fee for joining now is only $50 a year so that it’s accessible for just about everybody.
Brad Williams 00:36:26 If you’re in a WordPress space in any way, it’s it’s a no brainer. You need to be a Post Status member. And I don’t just say that because I’m not sponsored. So, and I don’t just say that because I like Michelle and, you know, and Joost and everybody over there. It truly is a who’s who of the WordPress community. So if you’re doing anything in WordPress 50 bucks a year, you sign up.
Michelle Frechette 00:36:45 You can’t beat it. Absolutely. So I met somebody new. I met them online, and then I met them at Press Conf. Zach Hendershot is going to be here next week to talk about Miruni. I hope I said it right. Which is a way to automate website edit requests from your customers using AI. And he’s going to demo that next week. So we’re going to get to see what that looks like. So, I’m just super excited about all the new things, yours and Zach’s and other things that are happening in WordPress that we can all use and benefit from. So, yeah. So make sure that you’re here next week to learn from Zach about what his newest thing is. If you have something new that you’d like to have on the show, message me. I will absolutely get you scheduled in. I just love being able to help showcase what people are doing in WordPress, so I would love to have you.
Michelle Frechette 00:37:34 Thank you so much, Brad. I know that this is helpful to you as well, but it’s absolutely helpful to me. Oh, look, we got from your own studio. I don’t know who’s running that right now unless it’s you.
Brad Williams 00:37:46 It’s Jen in the background.
Michelle Frechette 00:37:48 Hey, Jen. Innovation. Innovation is alive and well in WordPress.
Brad Williams 00:37:51 Yeah. No. You’re welcome Michelle, and thank you for all you do. Appreciate you, not just having me on, but I was going through some of the older episodes, and, like, just it’s a good place to get people’s voices out there. Some. Some more recognizable than others. But, you know, it’s nice to see the consistency. And I go back and I watch Taco, and I saw a lot of old friends and, cool to see what they’re up to as well, so. Yeah. Great job.
Michelle Frechette 00:38:13 Yeah. Confirmation it is Jen. Great show. Thanks, Jen. Thanks, everybody for checking out this. Checking us out this week. Thank you, Brad, for being here. next week we’ll talk to Zach and we’ll just keep going. We won’t have a show the week of WordCamp Europe because I will be in Europe, but every other time, every other week than that, we will be here. So thank you everybody for being here.
Brad Williams: Bye.
Michelle Frechette: See you all later!
