Blog

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

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.
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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.

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.

ClassifAI Updates Roundup: A More Powerful, Flexible AI Toolkit for WordPress

Jeff Paul on March 20

Over the past year, ClassifAI has introduced major enhancements that make it even more powerful, user-friendly, and flexible for content creators and publishers. From a redesigned setup experience to new AI-powered content tools, these updates focus on making AI more accessible, customizable, and privacy-conscious for publishers, enterprises, and other WordPress power users.

Here’s a roundup of the most notable new features and improvements.

Introducing Monitor by Fueled+10up: Real-Time Tracking of Key Site Health Vitals

Taylor Lovett on March 13

At Fueled+10up, we don’t just build enterprise-grade digital experiences—we ensure they operate at peak performance, every day. As we’ve scaled, supporting the long-term health of hundreds of websites efficiently and consistently has become increasingly complex. Every site needs to be fast, accessible, up-to-date, and secure—but efficiently monitoring these key health vitals across different platforms, environments, and teams was increasingly a challenge.

That’s why we built Monitor: a unified solution that simplifies site health tracking, bringing critical performance, accessibility, security, and platform vitals into a single, purpose-built system. Instead of bouncing between generic monitoring tools or manually checking for updates, our teams—and our clients—get a unified and clear view of a site’s status, with proactive alerts and an easy-to-access dashboard.

By developing our own solution, we’ve reduced inefficiencies, lowered reliance on third-party tools, and ensured that our monitoring is tailored to our standards, our platforms, and our clients’ expectations. More importantly, clients benefit from transparency—they can check in on their site’s key vitals at any time, with a system that ensures every site receives the same high standard of oversight, no matter what.

Salesforce’s Salesblazer Wins Project of the Year

Elena Bargo on November 20, 2024

At the 2024 Content Marketing Awards, Salesforce’s Salesblazer was awarded Project of the Year—a huge honor for the initiative that launched in 2023. Salesblazer is a community where sales professionals share ideas, learn new skills, network, and advance their careers. The Salesblazer hub — one of several Salesblazer channels — is where sales professionals can find the latest sales-related content, product information, and events.

10up built the Salesblazer Hub within Salesforce.com, in partnership with the Salesforce Blog and Salesblazer teams. It is highly scalable and the content is easily managed and edited by non-technical Salesforce staff. Similar hubs can be created for other target audiences.

Discover all of the 2024 Content Marketing Awards winners and be sure to check out Salesblazer for the latest sales insights.

Introducing HeadstartWP: An Open Source, Nimble Framework for Headless WordPress Sites

Taylor Lovett on June 15, 2023 • 2 Comments

Drawing from lessons learned building and supporting dozens of headless sites for our clients, 10up architected HeadstartWP: a jumping-off point for decoupled builds, powered by WordPress and Next.js. HeadstartWP delivers premium 10up craftsmanship with time-saving efficiencies for developers. In keeping with our commitment to giving back to the open web ecosystem, HeadstartWP is now available as a free and open source framework.

A light-weight, highly flexible, and extensible toolkit, HeadstartWP is everything a developer needs to start building a decoupled site using modern, broadly adopted technologies.

ClassifAI Turns 2.0, With OpenAI Integrations and Content Generation Applications

Jeff Paul on May 2, 2023

The latest 2.0 release of ClassifAI — our open source plugin that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) to augment content creation within WordPress — comes with OpenAI GPT and DALL·E integration, expanding the plugin’s capabilities in aiding editors.