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Since I wrote my last article about the themes I use on this site and in my client work… everything has changed multiple times for me. The biggest difference from 2023 to now for me is that GeneratePress is no longer alweays my go to solution and has not been for a while. There are a few reasons for that but it’s mostly about changes in my workflow and not anything wrong with GeneratePress or Generate Blocks themselves.

The start of my latest evolution

I know it’s a cliché to say that but there have been a few game-changing things happening in both the WordPress ecosystem as well as my own work in the last 3 years. The biggest one for me was finally giving Bricks Builder a real chance in late 2024 (3 years after I bought it). Starting to work with Bricks got me to discover CSS frameworks and tools like Automatic.css (ACSS) which is a very powerful CSS framework that completely changed the way I work.

Bricks and ACSS have also launched me on a new learning phase where I significantly deepened my knowledge of modern web development practices and workflows. I started implementing a class-first approach based on tokenization, the DRY principle (which I already applied as well as I could), BEM naming and reusable components.

When I discovered Kevin Geary’s original Page Building 101 tutorial video series, where he used Bricks to build sites with modern methods, it completely pushed my own workflow to a new level.

Not only that, but Bricks was so much easier to use for me than my prior Generate Press/Generate Blocks toolset or any other theme I’ve used before. The Bricks UI, although not perfect, enabled me to work a lot faster and cut my use of plugins or 3rd party solutions as tools for animations, sliders, loops and grids, displaying dynamic data, conditionals and a lot more are built-in.

In fact, working with dynamic data is so much easier and more powerful in Bricks that it made Generate Press and Generate Blocks feel limited and somewhat clunky to me in comparison. I do not say that lightly, as I still have a ton of respect for Tom Usborne and the Generate products, community and team and that ecosystem has evolved greatly in the past few months. But Bricks’ advantages for my workflow were very compelling to me in 2024 and 2025.

Still, there were issues with Bricks that I had never faced with Generate, mainly the fact that using Bricks made client editing a lot harder unless you let clients use Bricks itself, which is a really bad idea. So I used it more for web sites where clients left all the content editing to us. But this kept bothering me and, alongside that, the Generate ecosystem kept evolving and getting better with none of these issues.

The Real Game Changer: Etch – A Builder for Modern Web Development Workflows

Things changed again for me in January 2026 when the first Alpha version of Etch Builder was released to early buyers. I had bought into Etch at the earliest opportunity based on the strenght of ACSS, Kevin’s content and my belief in the quality of the Digital Gravy team (the company behind ACSS, Frames and Etch). That was before there was any usable software became available to actually try but the promise was very compelling to me.

But then, when it was actually released, I do believe that this was the biggest game-changing thing that happened in the WordPress ecosystem in years.

Etch is a next generation visual development environment that was created by the same folks who created Automatic.css and the same attention to detail and respect for modern web development methodologies were part of the vision and philosophy of Etch from the start.

It has completely changed everything for me. Etch is different because it was built for developers and to answer a completely different question than traditional page builders, who usually base their product design on the following premise: “How can we make web design easy for laypeople?” Creating a page builder based on that premise makes for products that try to remove complexity as much as possible but at the heavy cost of producing mediocre quality, bloated and inaccessible code. These builders often create sites that are slow and hard to use, as most people using them do not possess the actual skills required to master this craft. Because, make no mistake, regardless of the false promises made by the creators of these products and by many tech influencers, building a web site that is fast, easy to use, SEO optimized and follows accessibility requirements is a complex craft that takes years of learning and effort to master. And I’m not even mentioning the design and UX skills required to come up with a visual concept that can convert…

Instead, the creators of Etch asked much a better question: “How can we use a visual environment to fundamentally innovate a professional web development workflow that truly respects the language of the web?” This shift in philosophy removed all of the downsides of traditional page builders by giving professional users access to everything at all times (HTML, CSS and Javascript). Etch is a builder that enables professionals to work quickly in an environment that respects modern web development methodologies and gets out of your way while giving you tools that make sense to developers and help you work faster at every turn.

There are no proprietary and limiting styling inputs in Etch. No oversimplified no-code or low-code interfaces that were created not to scare laypeople but that greatly limit professional workflows. You have immediate access to view and edit the HTML, CSS and JavaScript code in your pages and templates directly in the UI at all times. Creating loops, conditional logic and using dynamic data are also very straightforward, as is changing any element’s HTML tag or adding attributes like aria- or data- for example.

Creating and working with components is also easier and a lot more flexible in Etch than in any other builder I’ve used, as it makes creating and using component props a lot easier. The actual prop creation UI is the best I’ve seen with the ability to group props, create conditional logic for them and a lot more.

True Data Liberation and Unmatched Portability

There are two key aspects to understanding the true game-changing nature of Etch‘s portability and data liberation features.

First is the fact that, when working in Etch, any element you add and components you create or paste in are automatically authored to custom Gutenberg blocks, which are stored in core WordPress. These blocks provide fully editable content in Gutenberg, thus solving the main problem I had with Bricks. If using components, those are saved directly to synched patterns in core WordPress as well and any props set in the component are also available to use in Gutenberg without the need to create a special type of component or use a third party plugin or creating the component in a special way. By using conditionals in the props, you can even decide what parts of the components are exposed to specific user roles in Gutenberg.

Also, since the Etch theme is an FSE theme, the automated block authoring feature of the Etch builder plugin means the content is as close to native as can be. Moreover, the Etch team has promised that they will eventually release a free “bridge” plugin that will ensure that a site continues to work and look the same even if Etch is removed.

Secondly, on the portability aspect, when you copy an element or component in Etch, what you are actually copying is JSON code so you can paste the element back directly in any other Etch site or save as in a text file to share with others as is or put in a library to share or sell those components or patterns to others. There are already several advanced Etch users sharing professional components and patters for free or for a price, making it very easy to find something exactly like what you need or very close to it. Just the basic copy-pasting directly to another site has already saved me so much time…

The other compelling workflow advantage is that, when copy-pasting, you have the choice of keeping or overriding any CSS or JavaScript tied to the elements inside what you copied when existing elements in the destination site have the same CSS class names. No need to export or import back. This enabled me to sometimes start building a component (like header, hero section, etc.) in one site, copying it to another where I had to augment or improve the component’s features and then paste it back into the original site, thus automatically upgrading the original component.

I will expand on these things in future articles, as the implications are greater than what I explain here.

Rapid Evolution & Transparency

The above really only covers the surface of what Etch is and does. One of its advantages and its rapid evolution. Not only that but the rapid evolution in public, with the team taking in feedback from users and releasing bug fixes and new features almost every week and sometimes more often.

At this time (the current version, as of writing this, is 1.6.2) Etch is a very different product than what it was at the start of the year, with UI improvements, evolving smart AI integration and a lot more happening at a rapid pace.

Until the full planned native components are done, some of the editing work is a little more manual than what it will become but even so, Etch’s own patterns library as well as a few third party ones offer solutions that work now and don’t risk breaking in the future. I’ve already built complex carousels using custom JS (with the help of Claude) or agmented by Motion.page for specific animations and it all works seemlessly.

With the evolution of its own built-in AI, Etch promises to save its users even more time in the future building sites quicker without loosing full control over the final output which remains accessible directly at all times.

This, to me, is a real game-changer!