Xenio: Exploring AI-Assisted Migration
As part of our focus this year, the team has been actively incorporating AI into different parts of our workflow. It is already part of how we approach marketing, prototyping, and day-to-day development, from quick POCs to AI-assisted coding. Building on that, we wanted to push further and test how far this can go in real-world scenarios.
One area we chose to explore is Xenio, our fintech product for automating back-office operations in the wholesale debt market. The product has been stable for years with minimal maintenance, but it has long been on our wishlist to migrate it to our current stack. It was originally built on Microsoft ASP.NET, and we have been planning to move it to a modern setup using Laravel and Filament.
This is not a small task. Even with AI, a full migration is still a serious engineering effort. AI is a tool, not a magic wand, and we approached it with that mindset. After a few weeks of focused work, we were able to achieve a level-one migration of the codebase that is already functional. There are still rough edges, and it will require hands-on development to refine and stabilize.
What stands out is the leverage AI provides. It allows us to revisit ideas that once felt too heavy to attempt. We will continue exploring this over the next few weeks and share a more detailed migration case study soon.
Gymie: Getting ready for Early Access
This month, we continued shaping the new Gymie landing page as part of our broader push toward public launch and marketing readiness.
After evolving Gymie into V3 and improving the core product experience, it felt important to bring the website up to the same standard. The goal now is to present Gymie more clearly, not just as an open-source gym management system, but as a modern platform for gyms, studios, and fitness businesses.
The updated design focuses on clarity, stronger positioning, and better alignment with where Gymie is heading. It is less about just having a landing page and more about creating a foundation for upcoming outreach, storytelling, and early user engagement.
Gymie is still in pre-launch, but the website is getting close to being ready for public visibility. Once it is in a good place, we will begin opening up access, starting with a waitlist for those interested in following the journey and trying the product early.
Slider Block: Query Loop Support
One update we were especially excited to ship in April was Query Loop support for the Slider Block.
In WordPress, the Query Loop block is a powerful way to display content dynamically whether that’s posts filtered by category, tags, publish date, or even custom post types. It takes care of fetching the content, while users stay in control of how it’s presented.
With this release, the Slider Block now plugs directly into that flow. You can create sliders for blog posts, featured stories, updates, or any repeatable content without manually building each slide. It’s a much more natural way to work with dynamic content and keeps everything in sync as your site grows.
This makes the Slider Block a stronger fit for content-driven websites. Instead of managing sliders as static elements, users can rely on WordPress to keep content fresh, while the Slider Block handles layout and interaction.
It’s also a step toward simplifying our stack helping us replace bulky plugins and the workarounds we’ve relied on across internal and client projects. As always, we’re building the tools we use ourselves.
BlaBlaBlocks Formats: new formats
We shipped a small but genuinely useful update to BlaBlaBlocks Formats this month, introducing two additions: Typography Format and Clear Formatting.
Typography Format came from a very real moment during client work. While writing content, we needed to style just a few words within a paragraph not bold or italic, but subtle tweaks like font size, casing, or slight typographic adjustments. In WordPress, there wasn’t a clean way to do this without breaking the flow either by adding custom styles or inserting extra blocks for something so minor.
That friction didn’t sit right.
Typography Format solves this by bringing inline typography controls directly into RichText. Instead of managing more blocks, users can now style exactly what they need, right where they’re writing keeping the experience fluid and focused.
We also introduced Clear Formatting to tackle another common annoyance: messy pasted content. Text copied from documents or websites often carries hidden styles. Clear Formatting lets users quickly reset selected text to a clean state—something long overdue in the block editor experience.
Both updates are small, but they meaningfully improve day-to-day editing. And that’s the goal with Formats removing those tiny, persistent frictions.
As always, we’re building tools we rely on ourselves while cleaning up scattered customizations across our projects.
What We’re Learning and Applying
Each month, we take a step back and look at what’s happening around the industry and ecosystem, picking a few ideas and tools that we can learn from and bring into our own work.
A few things that stood out this time:
- In the WordPress.com ecosystem, Studio Code beta introduces a CLI that feels like having a WordPress expert in your terminal. It can read codebases, edit files, run commands, and spin up local sites with best practices baked in. Alongside that, WordPress Studio continues to evolve with a CLI on npm and built-in phpMyAdmin access, making everyday local workflows faster and more complete.
- On the backend side, Laravel is moving toward API starter kits, giving teams a cleaner foundation for SaaS, mobile backends, and integrations.
- Closer to home, Frappeverse Mumbai 2026 was announced for August.
- On the AI front, OpenAI GPT-5.5 signals a shift toward more agent-like workflows, while Google Chrome introduces Skills for reusable AI workflows, and Google Gemini adds file generation directly from prompts.
All of these are different in scope, but they point in a similar direction: tools are becoming more capable, more automated, and closer to how we actually work.
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