Another year of Ollie — and the foundation for what’s next

Hey folks, Mike here from Ollie. As we approach our 3rd year anniversary, I thought it was time for our yearly look back — so I went back through everything we shipped this past year, and honestly, the list is longer than I remembered.

So let’s do a proper walkthrough and see what we’ve crafted over the last twelve months, and then a look at where it’s all heading. Let’s get into it.

We made Ollie more powerful to build with

The whole year had one theme, even if we didn’t say it out loud at the time: supercharge the block editor and start blazing a new path for WordPress site building.

This started with a heavy focus on improving the day-to-day experience we all have in the WordPress block editor.

Pro Extensions

It started with Pro Extensions. We took the blocks you use every day and supercharged them — responsive grid controls, smooth animations, hover effects, keyboard shortcuts. The trick was making them feel like they’d always been there, like WordPress shipped them itself.

Class Manager

Then in December came Class Manager — the one a lot of you developers had been asking for. Real CSS control, right inside the editor. Create and manage your own classes, work with pseudo-states like hover and focus, and it only loads the CSS you actually use. The kind of professional control that used to mean dropping into code now just lives in the canvas with you.

Smart Sync

Then we shipped Smart Sync. You style one block — a button, a card, whatever — and push that exact styling to every similar block in your layout with one click. Design one thing, update everything. Such a small interaction, and it saves so much time.

We made Ollie do more

The other half of the year was about making Ollie do more — letting you build whole categories of site you couldn’t really build before.

Menu Designer

First came Menu Designer. Block themes didn’t have a proper navigation feature set yet, so we built it. We shipped beautiful responsive dropdowns, mega menus, mobile menus, all made with native blocks. And we put it on WordPress.org for everyone to use for free!

Not only that, our work on Menu Designer was used as the foundation to much better mobile menu support in WordPress core.

Full support for WooCommerce

Then the big one: full support for WooCommerce. A complete suite of designs, templates, and blocks for WooCommerce to build a modern, blazing-fast store right inside the block editor. Ollie went from great for your site to great for your store, basically overnight. If you’ve ever tried to make a store look genuinely good without a pile of plugins, you know why we’re proud of this one.

Introducing Ollie AI

Here’s where it all comes together. Because everything above — the patterns, the design system, all that control — turned out to be the foundation for something bigger.

A rebuilt Pattern Library with AI search

In April, we rebuilt the Pattern Library from the ground up and put AI vector search underneath it. So instead of digging through categories looking for the right layout, you just describe what you want and it finds the match by meaning, not keywords. You can assemble a full page in seconds.

Design and write with AI, right in the editor

Then last month, the piece that pulls it all together. WordPress 7.0 shipped with AI infrastructure built right into core — an open, standard way to connect the AI platform of your choice to your site. WordPress didn’t pick a winner or bolt on its own thing; it laid a foundation. So we built on it.

Now you can type /design, describe a section — “a new section for my features” — and Ollie pulls matching patterns right onto the page.

On the writing side, select any pattern or inline text and rework it straight from the toolbar. It rewrites the words without touching your layout; spacing, structure, and design all stay exactly where you put them. And with the context picker, it can pull in your own pages or a brand voice doc, so what comes back sounds like you — not generic AI filler.

Design a section, write its content, sharpen the message — all without leaving the editor, all without fighting your layout. That’s genuinely new in WordPress. It made building fun again.

Build like a pro with the Ollie MCP

We also shipped an Ollie MCP, which lets an AI agent connect to your actual site and build on it directly — not in some chat window off to the side you copy and paste out of, but on the real thing.

It can read your pages, apply patterns, manage your global styles, your navigation, your templates, etc. And even better, it knows Ollie deeply. It knows Ollie features, settings, the design system, and how to use it super efficiently.

Where we’re going

Recently, WordPress 7.0 made AI a first-class citizen in core. It added AI infrastructure that standardizes how we use AI and build products for it in WordPress. We immediately started shipping features for it.

We believe the future of WordPress publishing lies in the unification of a beautifully-intuitive editing interface combined with supercharged features like Ollie Pro and AI.

As we continue to bring these things together, we’re actively shaping a powerful new way of building on WordPress — one that is deeply informed by the past but unequivocally dashing towards the future.

Stay tuned! We’re working on something that is going to create a major wave in the WordPress industry, and we can’t wait to show you what it is.