Blog

Meet the new Fueled brand; 10up becomes the brand of our WordPress practice

When Fueled and 10up joined in 2023, we aligned two leading agencies, each renowned for innovation, craftsmanship, and excellence. This week, we take a big step forward in our journey: the unveiling of our refreshed and unified company brand as Fueled.

The name may be familiar, but our revitalized identity encapsulates our collective achievements and boldly speaks to a time of transformation. It tells a more complete story about who we are together, what we’re building, and how we’re evolving in a fast-changing digital world.

Using AI and WordPress to Raise the Bar for Civic Technology with CalMatters and Cal Poly

Steve Meyers on April 29

At Fueled+10up, we believe technology can—and should—make the world more understandable, accessible, and transparent. That’s why we were proud to partner with CalMatters, a leading nonprofit newsroom focused on California policy and politics, and California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) to create DigitalDemocracy.org: a first-of-its-kind, AI-powered platform that makes government data easier for everyday citizens and journalists to explore, understand, and act on.

Working together, we helped bring massive, often fragmented public datasets—legislation, campaign donations, committee transcripts, hearing videos, and more—into a single, intuitive experience powered by a modern, headless WordPress architecture, Elasticsearch, and AI-enhanced content aggregation.

The result is an unprecedented public resource that brings new life to civic transparency—and sets a new standard for making government data truly accessible.

You can read the full case study to dive deeper into how we combined cutting-edge technology with thoughtful user experience and design.

If you’re ready to build a platform that moves the needle—whether it’s in civic tech, media, or beyond—we’d love to start the conversation.

Bringing AI to the Publisher Behind Rolling Stone and Variety

Jake Goldman on April 24

When Penske Media Corporation (PMC), the publisher behind iconic brands like Rolling Stone, Variety, and Billboard, wanted to incorporate generative AI into their stack in 2023, they came to us seeking a close knit collaboration that would use our existing open source AI toolkit for WordPress, ClassifAI, as the starting point. Working hand-in-hand, we iteratively and rapidly tested, integrated, and deployed AI features with a focus on improving editorial workflow productivity, improving visitor engagement, and driving SEO.

ClassifAI and its existing architecture gave us a huge head start. A project that started with Machine Learning applications in 2018, it already had AI-powered capabilities like smart content tagging, SEO-optimized title recommendations, image generation and automatic image descriptions. ClassifAI’s service-agnostic architecture gave PMC the ability to immediately integrate their existing and trusted cloud services provider, Microsoft, using Azure’s OpenAI service.
Read More on Bringing AI to the Publisher Behind Rolling Stone and Variety

Fueled+10up Leads the Way in the Making of WordPress 6.8

Jeff Paul on April 17

Earlier this week, WordPress 6.8 was released, with a major focus on refinement and polish, including iterative improvements to block editing, website performance, and accessibility.

Once again, our team led the way in contributing to one of the internet’s largest open source projects, estimated to power 40% of websites. Twenty-four 10uppers contributed to WordPress 6.8 “Cecil”, with Jeff Paul as Release Coordinator, Joe McGill as Tech Lead, and Fabian Kaegy, Peter Wilson, and Mukesh Panchal as Noteworthy Contributors.

Other Fueled+10up contributors included Ajay Maurya, Ankit Gade, Ankit Gupta, Darin Kotter, Dharmesh Patel, Faisal Alvi, Harshal Kadu, Karthik Thayyil, Konstantinos Galanakis, Mohit Dadhich, Navneet Kaur, Rahul Prajapati, Severine Pozzo, Siddharth Thevaril, Sourabh Jain, Sumit Bagthariya, Thrijith Thankachan, Tyler Bailey, and Vikram Moparthy. We’d also like to recognize our partners at Google and Elementor for sponsoring some of our contributions during parts of this release cycle.

2025 ElasticPress Updates Deliver New & Improved WordPress Search Capabilities

Thorsten Ott on April 15

ElasticPress, our speedy and intelligent website search solution that brings Elasticsearch to WordPress, continues to evolve to support new use cases and improve usability for site owners and developers. With the release of ElasticPress 5.2, and the companion ElasticPress Labs 2.4 update, we’ve added highly sought after enhancements that make our WordPress search solution even more versatile for professional site developers, including enhanced support for a popular WordPress field management plugin, location based searching, and improvements for headless applications of WordPress.
Read More on 2025 ElasticPress Updates Deliver New & Improved WordPress Search Capabilities

Ignite: A Sanity CMS Starter Kit for Content-Driven Marketing Sites

Taylor Lovett on April 11

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, the most effective websites aren’t just online brochures—they are dynamic hubs for storytelling, engagement, and lead generation. Forward-thinking online marketers need websites and tools optimized for strategic audience growth and engagement.

At Fueled+10up, high-performing storytelling hubs for the enterprise are one of our most common engagement types, as we’ve helped clients like Salesforce build award-winning dedicated news and blog centers that drive results.

This led us to create Ignite for Sanity, a powerful website starter kit and template for enterprises that have adopted Sanity as a content management system (CMS). Ignite for Sanity is specifically engineered to support businesses whose digital marketing strategies include regularly publishing articles, news, blogs, and resources. Ignite is carefully designed from the ground up to enhance content visibility, audience interaction, and search engine performance.

Microsoft Research and Harvard School of Public Health Recognized in the 2025 Webby Awards

Jake Goldman on April 8

It’s web awards season, and once again, we’re thrilled to share 10up projects and clients recognized in the 29th Annual Webby Awards: Microsoft Research and Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The Webby Awards honor excellence on the Internet, celebrating the most innovative and impactful websites, apps, and digital experiences.

Microsoft Research is an Honoree in the Websites and Mobile Sites – Business Blog/Website category. We’ve worked with Microsoft Research for a decade, most recently redesigning and building this Webby-recognized site and co-creating generative AI-powered experiences. Our most recent AI experience built in partnership with Microsoft’s team, enables researchers to rapidly identify papers and projects of interest and helps build meaningful relationships across research teams. We also provide enterprise-grade infrastructure support and optimization on Azure for these sites.

Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health has also been nominated for a Webby Award for Websites and Mobile Sites – School/University. We partnered with longtime collaborator Wide Eye, who expertly harnessed their creative agency’s focus on public sector and political work to lead design and content strategy, while our team spearheaded engineering and delivery, including in-browser refinement.

Shortly after this post was published, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health won the People’s Voice Award for Websites and Mobile Sites – School/University. Congratulations to the entire Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health website team.
Read More on Microsoft Research and Harvard School of Public Health Recognized in the 2025 Webby Awards

How We’re Bringing Generative AI to WordPress, Without External Cloud APIs

Darin Kotter on March 27

Following our post covering the latest innovations with ClassifAI—our AI-powered WordPress plugin—I’ve published an article on LinkedIn exploring how self-hosted AI models can open up new possibilities for WordPress-powered websites.

Here’s an excerpt from the full article:

I realized that integrating Ollama into our AI plugin ClassifAI could unlock something special: bringing the power of generative AI to WordPress on our terms. No cloud fees, no data leaving the site – just WordPress and AI working together in a more private, flexible way.

If you’re interested in how we built this integration, and what this could suggest about the future of AI for open source platforms like WordPress, you can read the full article on LinkedIn.

Preparing for EAA: Streamline Compliance with PDF Accessibility Checker by Fueled+10up

Hugo Solar on March 25

The European Accessibility Act (EAA), set to take effect on June 28, 2025, is a significant step toward digital inclusivity, requiring websites and digital documents—including PDFs—to meet strict accessibility standards. However, auditing PDFs for compliance at scale is no small feat, especially for enterprises and other organizations managing hundreds or thousands of files across multiple domains.

To help our clients address this challenge, we developed the PDF Accessibility Checker—a handful of scripts that integrate with the WordPress command line interface (CLI), Adobe’s PDF Accessibility Checker API, and Google Sheets to automate PDF accessibility audits. I’m pleased to share that we’ve now open sourced this tool.

Building Monitor: The Tech Behind Our Website Health Monitoring Tool

Taylor Lovett on March 21

Following up on my post introducing Monitor, I’ve published an article on LinkedIn that digs into some of the bigger technical and data management decisions our team made while architecting the site monitoring platform we built to reliably and efficiently monitor our clients’ websites.

Here’s the opening from the full article:

Building Monitor, our website health monitoring tool, was a fulfilling challenge that required thoughtful engineering choices under real-world constraints. As technical leaders in enterprise caliber CMS and product development, we know that picking the proper CMS backbone, UI framework, and data strategy can make or break a project. In the case of Monitor – a platform watching hundreds of websites – we had to carefully balance scalability, flexibility, and performance at every layer.

I wanted to share how and why we chose our tech stack, including Payload CMS as the backend, Google’s Material UI for the front-end, and share a little about our data polling and management approach, which keeps Monitor timely and efficient.

If you’re interested in how and why we chose the architecture and platforms behind Monitor—or just love a good technical deep dive—you can read the full article on LinkedIn.