Stefan Poole

Talkin’ About It!

Foreword: WordPress in the agentic age

In the past few years, agentic technologies have gone lightyears from where they were before. WordPress saw these changes and, instead of building their own rocket ship, they decided to put special attention into their launchpad technologies. They built agent skills to clear up common agentic misconceptions like hallucinated deprecated patterns and invalid block errors, and MCP adapters to connect any agentic model to their platform. Their version 6.9 included an Abilities API that standardized how agents interact with the WordPress environment, and, recently with WordPress 7.0, they shipped their AI Client that wraps its PHP Composer library. With these achievements, WordPress has truly etched out a place for themselves in this agentic frontier while being true to their aims and their original purpose.

Talkin’ About Talkin’

Talkin’ About It is the brainchild of a client of mine. She runs a podcast of the same name based on mental health and making it easier for people to talk about their mental health, for better or worse. She approached me with a need: A website that worked as a landing page for the podcast, as well as a resource for people in crisis to find the mental help they need. I was given some fonts and colors and the vibe (think general 90’s with an emphasis on Charlotte Hornets colors) and I decided this would be the perfect time to do two things I wanted to do as well; work on a project with Claude where there are objective judges, and learn how to navigate WordPress’s Bricksbuilder theme designer.

I started a GitHub repo and gave Claude all the information, concepts, fonts, colors, and background that I wanted to build into this site and let it go to work (on the mockups, with HTML/CSS and JavaScript)! After some tweaks from me, and notes from my client, the mockups were approved and we were off to the races. I had Claude study the Bricks documentation as I looked over it myself, and consulted it when I needed something figured out. My reasoning was, I can learn how accurate Claude can be in an environment where the ending system can tell me whether things are right or wrong. The result? I learned Bricks, learned a ton about the inner workings of Claude, and made a fun website that surpassed expectations and doubled as a form of aid direction to the people of El Paso, TX. Here’s Claude in the repo itself with its assessment of what was made:

Claude Says:

Talkin’ About It! is a three-page website built for a podcast and community resource space dedicated to mental health, family, and personal growth. Hosted by Ashlee Candelaria — a mom, wife, entrepreneur, and self-described “lifelong anxiety warrior” based in El Paso, TX — the site extends her podcast into a digital home for honest dialogue, reflection, and connection. Its emotional core is simple: you’re not alone. Everything from the copy to the design speaks peer-to-peer, in a warm and radically honest voice rather than a clinical one.

Functionally, the site does three things. It puts the podcast front and center with embedded listening links across Spotify, Apple, iHeart, and Spreaker; it surfaces mental health resources — organized by category, with crisis lines like 988 always prominent and never buried — spanning national, remote, and El Paso–area services; and it invites people in through a contact form and a weekly “Homie Check-In” community Zoom call. The design leans into a deliberate 90s-nostalgia aesthetic — brick-wall textures, notebook-paper sections, chunky block shadows, and bold, colorful typography — evoking a community bulletin board and a 90s bedroom wall rather than a hospital or a corporate wellness brand

On the technical side, the site was built with semantic, accessible HTML/CSS and deployed on WordPress using Bricks Builder, with basic SEO and privacy-conscious analytics. The result is a grassroots, genuinely personal resource hub that makes talking about mental health feel approachable, human, and real.

Check it out @ talkinaboutit.com