Here’s my 2025 year-end review. This is about my 2025 in WordPress and the things that changed for me, tools I discovered, workflows that changed and all that. If you are looking for a generalized wide scoped year-end review, this one is not it. But if you are a WordPress builder (developer, freelancer, agency owner or dev) and are looking for modern tools and development processes, this article should interest you. Especially if you have ever read one of my “State of my 20XX Toolset: Themes” articles from the past.
2025 has been a year of big changes and learning for me that really all started in the second half of 2024. After using the same building tools and methods to build WordPress web sites for years, everything changed for me in 2025.
As usual, this was motivated by technical challenges I had with my pre-2025 toolset while building client sites with specific requirements. My older toolset was still heavily based on the GeneratePress as well as Kadence ecosystems and a slew of plugins for specific needs (image galleries, listings of all kinds, etc.) I was running into limitations of those other plugins all the time, breakage on updates, heavy JS and CSS code, etc. All that time, wondering why Generate moved so slowly.
I craved more flexibility and ease of use so, in early 2024, I was really starting to lean more on Kadence than Generate which had been my main toolset for years. The Kadence theme has had a great header and footer builder for a long time, while this has only been added to Generate recently. But in 2024, my frustration with Generate was growing.
Kadence also gave me more design flexibility and ease of use, had built-in tools that enabled me to not rely on specialized plugins as heavily and it also has better dynamic features… except for query loops, where both Generate Blocks and Kadence Blocks still fail to support user queries, which had become essential for me, especially for one client site where I needed to replace a breaking implementation of a members listing table (using WP users that signed up for a fee) that was based on 3 separate plugins interacting (Pods, Pods Pro and TablePress) and quite a bit of custom code. This fragile structure broke after one of those plugins (TablePress Pro) updated to a major new version that dropped important features the solution relied on. This had worked flawlessly for 5+ years but I needed to find a solution or leave the 3 plugins at the versions that worked… which is never a good idea security-wise..
I tried a bunch of specialized plugins for user listings but none gave me the specific features I needed and it was one more janky solution based on third-party plugins that could break at any time.
My other choice was to somehow transform the native user profiles the implementation was based on to a CPT but connecting it all was a challenge and, of course, this was not based on any new requests from the client. If only Generate Blocks supported user queries, I could have built the solution with it and stopped relying on TablePress entirely. But as of January 2026, it still doesn’t…
So I needed to find another way, as this was just one of the issues I was facing where neither Generate nor Kadence could help me directly.
2025 and Another Theme Toolset Evolution
So I started looking more closely at Bricks, which I had purchased in 2021 and started seriously testing it in my sandbox in mid 2024. Two things that made Bricks really click for me at that point. First, it has a better, more efficient and more modern workflow that I discovered via Kevin Geary’s tutorial videos for Bricks and his company’s Automatic.css framework (ACSS for short). ACSS is a very powerful and flexible CSS framework used with professional builders like Bricks and others that enables you to have smarter defaults and automated design decisions made out of the box (for typography, spacing, etc.) without preventing you from modifying anything you want… in detail. I had never used such a framework and that was a revelation to me.
Second, Bricks itself solved my user profiles/membership querying issues by enabling me to create any types of queries (including user queries) directly in the builder, including building a dynamic table and handling any dynamic data way more easily without relying on any third-party plugins. That includes adding a modal from a single cell in each row of a dynamic table querying users of a certain role. That is where all the user listings plugins I tried failed miserably, the inability to add multiple user data items (first and last name, email, data from a couple of Pods relationship fields, etc.) to the same cell without making it extremely complicated. I did the proof of concept in Bricks with its dynamic data tags in less than 30 minutes. To say I was impressed is understating it! This is something I still could not do in either Generate nor Kadence now. That was also a revelation to me that completely changed the way I work in 2025. That level of flexibility and integration in a single interface was incredible to me.
So I decided to quietly rebuild pixelyzed.com in Bricks Builder and ACSS in late January 2025 in the little free time I had and that took a while. As usual, I was using this site to validate a new workflow and tools, as I have done many times before. I had actually purchased a Bricks LTD back in March 2021 and had watched it grow from a distance. But I had kept this site on GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks until that early 2025 rebuild.
To be fair, Generate (both theme and Blocks) have evolved a lot in 2025 too but for me, it’s like too little way too late. Working in Bricks feels so much more natural to me now and I almost never run into any limitations.
The only irritating downside with Bricks for me now is that client editing is not very fluid yet and how Bricks integrates with the Blocks editor (Gutenberg) is still clunky. This is something I’m still working on but Bricks keeps evolving this aspect and a third-party solution exists. With that said, client editing in Gutenberg is not impossible or terrible, just not as fluid as I would like it. But again, getting better and Bricks 2.2 will address some of it by enabling using components built in Bricks to be used as synced patterns in Gutenberg.
The Second 2025 Game Changer: Etch
While I was getting familiar with Bricks in the second half of 2024, I started hearing about a new builder called Etch. The promises were big and bold but enticing. It was being made for what was defined as a new era of building on WordPress. It was a builder made just for professionals and not a “simplified” (dumbed down) tool for laypeople like Elementor which brings a lot of issues with it… Code bloat, extremely inefficient workflows for experienced developers, making it easy for clients to break their sites. Again, there needs to be a better way.
Early promises from the Etch team included full-editing transparency and access to the code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) as well as automatic Gutenberg block authoring with 100% visual fidelity in Gutenberg. Those two things alone made it worth it for me to invest in Etch in September 2024, before there was even a publicly available alpha version to test. The reputation of Digital Gravy and the quality of their products (ACSS and Frames) as well as all the free educational content that Kevin Geary had published reassured me that they would deliver on these promises and they did… and then some.
Etch is still in beta now (but close to version 1.0.0) and some features are still missing for me to use it on client projects, but rebuilding this site with it convinced me that Etch is the future of building professional sites on WordPress. Again, on very limited free time. This second rebuild only took half the time of the Bricks one, despite having to do several things manually and navigate frequent changes during the alpha stage.
If you are a professional WordPress developer and are still unconvinced by Etch, keep your mind open and keep a close eye on it.
The third 2025 Game Changer: AI
I signed up to ChatGPT in April 2024 and at first, I only used it occasionally for small tasks, image generation and basically as a glorified search engine. I didn’t trust it with code for quite a while. But as its algorithm and features evolved, I started to rely on it more and more for troubleshooting and finding some very specific code solutions for very specific problems.
At first, it was a frustrating process, as it hallucinated non-existing WordPress or WooCommerce hooks and filters often but also, it pointed me to solutions I would have never found by Googling on my own. But as it kept evolving, it became far more accurate and I kept trying to drill into it that I prefer honesty to it trying to “please” me ;)
But sometimes, ChatGPT gave me solutions that were really overcomplicated and it can be way too verbose for my taste. So I decided to try another AI service. I signed up to Claude Pro in August 2025 after using the free version for a while. I started asking both for things using the same prompts and, at first, ChatGPT won on accuracy or finding more obscure solutions but, since Anthropic released the 4.5 versions of its models and especially with “Extended thinking” on, it offers way more elegant code solutions and they often work on the first try. I always review them, as “vibe coding” is really not my thing but it enables me to work faster and find solutions quicker.
Claude is also way better at writing copy and is also way better at translations than ChatGPT. It sounds way less AI-y ;), it’s less verbose and far more precise and specific when creating or translating text in specific niche industries. The speed at which Claude evolves and improves is staggering to me.
Summary
So, in summary, 2025 is a year where I learned a lot about modern web development methodologies (BEM, components, class-first, tokenization, etc.) through new tools I stated implementing in my agency’s workflows in late 2024 (Bricks).
Etch looks like it will take me even further on that path. But the most revolutionary change for me in 2025 was AI and how I let it helps me with complex issues more and more. Not only development challenges as explained above but also troubleshooting server problems and things like that.
On the professional side, my agency has also kept evolving and handling more complex projects for bigger clients. I look to 2026 with enthusiasm! If you need help with your web site, don’t hesitate to call on us: https://zonew3.com/en/contact/
On the personal side, I will post again in my personal stuff category but 2025 was the year my band released our first full-length album, “Hope”. We are very proud of it and we’ll play more shows in 2026. To find out where and when we play next, see our web site (built on Bricks :): https://somethingelsemusic.net/
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