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Bringing AI to the Publisher Behind Rolling Stone and Variety

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.
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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.

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.
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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.

Nineteen 10uppers Contribute to WordPress 6.7

Jeff Paul on November 15, 2024

WordPress released version 6.7 earlier this month, introducing the new default Twenty Twenty-Five Theme and greater design flexibility. Nineteen 10uppers contributed to the release, code-named “Rollins”.

This release brings more out-of-the-box design freedom than ever before, with new features such as:

A pared-down, flexible Twenty Twenty-Five Theme that is built to grow with your unique needs;
Customized font sizes with fluid typography to ensure responsive fonts no matter the size;
The ability to zoom out when editing content, to look at your site from a different perspective;
Code-free dynamic content by easily linking blocks to custom fields.

TechCrunch Relaunches in Partnership with 10up

Jake Goldman on October 8, 2024

Last week, TechCrunch launched a ground-up rebuild — a sleeker, easier-to-navigate, and more performant experience for the renowned tech newsroom.

The relaunch journey began behind-the-scenes earlier this year, when we upgraded their WordPress-powered backend to the block-based “Gutenberg” editor. In the months since, we worked alongside TechCrunch and its design partners to finish reimagining and building TechCrunch’s new reader experience.

Having personally been a part of multiple redesigns and upgrades with TechCrunch over more than a decade, it was a pleasure to see our team launch one of their biggest upgrades to this day. I’m grateful for the shout out and recognition of our work – and the wider set of teams we collaborated with – as part of the announcement story.

If you’re interested in learning how 10up can help your organization reach its digital goals, get in touch.

Sixteen 10uppers Contribute to WordPress 6.6

Jeff Paul on July 25, 2024

Earlier this month, WordPress released version 6.6, “Dorsey”, bringing more design freedom and a more efficient user experience. Sixteen 10uppers contributed to Dorsey, a reflection of 10up’s commitment to giving back to the open web.

The most notable improvements to come from WordPress 6.6 include:

The introduction of Section Styles gives the ability to override all the styles of a section, including nested elements & blocks.
A new Grid Block that brings more flexibility when laying out content.
An auto-update option for installed plugins — with the ability to roll back to previous versions if necessary.
The ability to have a negative value into custom spacing for margins, giving editors greater creative control.
The power to customize or override content in each instance of a synced pattern, while keeping consistent style and layout across them.
The introduction of a side-by-side layout for pages in the Site Editor with page preview capabilities.

Felipe Elia on April 22, 2024

I am proud to have been a mentor in the Second Cohort (2024 Q1) WordPress Contributor Mentorship, a six-week program that strengthens the contributor process for WordPress. I was one of 28 mentors who supported 52 mentees in extensive learning and contribution to WordPress Core and the latest 6.5 release in real-time.

Director of Open Source Initiatives Jeff Paul also served as a part of the WordPress Contributor Working Group, which manages the program.

If you’re interested in learning more about 10up’s leadership in the WordPress community, and how our expertise can help your organization reach its digital goals, get in touch.