Elliott Richmond reflects on more than two decades of working with WordPress, sharing how that experience has shaped his work as a creator, developer, and small-business-builder. He started developing sites before WordPress existed—cutting his teeth on b2 and transitioning into WordPress as it grew—while contributing to the community in many ways, including a 2013 WordPress advent calendar of code snippets.
A surprising chapter in Elliott’s story began during the COVID lockdowns. He and his wife launched a local pizza delivery operation that quickly outgrew its “temporary” label. By using WordPress as the backbone—WooCommerce for orders, Jetpack, and several custom tools—they built a functioning ecommerce and operational system that now supports a team of five and is offered as a licensed solution to other operators.
At the center of that effort is a plugin Elliott developed called Pizza Pilot. Pizza Pilot manages the full ordering flow and business rules: time-slot bookings, postcode-based radius delivery restrictions, and other constraints tuned to a small local food business. It’s distributed as a freemium plugin, with a Pro bundle included for licensees. The project demonstrates how flexible WordPress can be: handling payments and orders, applying geolocation rules, and supporting bespoke workflows without needing specialized external platforms.
Elliott uses the pizza business as a concrete example of WordPress serving as “glue” for nontraditional use cases. He points out how people in many trades—gardeners, local services, small retailers—run invoicing, bookings, and more through WordPress, leveraging plugins and custom code to avoid expensive niche systems.
That practical, creative use of WordPress extends into Elliott’s work as a content creator. After an invitation from contacts at Automattic (via Michelle Frechette and Stacey Carlson), Elliott began producing sponsored content about wordpress.com. The collaboration gave him early access to features and an opportunity to create videos through 2026. The arrangement is brief-driven rather than micromanaged: Automattic supplies audience targets and suggested themes, and Elliott produces both long-form tutorials and short-form spin-offs for his YouTube audience.
His content covers developer-focused topics and practical how-tos—templating, block patterns, Xdebug, AI-related workflows—and aims to close documentation and education gaps as WordPress evolves. Elliott sees YouTube as an especially effective medium for this work: video lets him show not only what to do but how to do it, and the comment-driven feedback loop often inspires follow-ups, refinements, or entirely new episodes. He welcomes critical feedback as useful data for iteration.
Production is deliberately low-fi and practical. Elliott records mainly on an iPhone, uses simple DIY lighting (a small box and tissue diffuser), and prioritizes quiet space and good audio. For editing and motion graphics he relies on DaVinci Resolve (with the paid license for extras when needed), and he monitors audio with studio monitors from his music-production background. His content process begins with a brain dump—Notes and voice-to-text—then a loose script or flashcard prompts for recording, followed by editing, AI-assisted polishing when helpful, and final refinements. He stresses that scripting—even at a high level—clarifies sequence and concept and that explaining topics publicly often triggers new insights from viewers and peers.
Elliott also emphasizes that wordpress.com and the standalone WordPress software share the same architectural core. Tools like the Studio app still allow local development and advanced workflows while providing the benefits of managed hosting, security, and performance. That overlap makes wordpress.com content useful to developers as well as site owners.
Looking ahead, Elliott will continue producing content for wordpress.com under the sponsorship while maintaining his independent channel and projects. His video output mixes technical tutorials with occasional behind-the-scenes of the pizza business—dough calculators, recipes, and operational tooling—to illustrate real-world applications. He values the autonomy in his creative process and the reciprocal learning that comes from teaching and receiving community feedback.
Find Elliott’s videos on YouTube at elliottrichmondwp and his writing at elliottrichmond.co.uk (double L, double T). Episode notes, links, and a transcript are available at wptavern.com/podcast for the Jukebox episode that covers this conversation.