The Guild
There is more WordPress information available than anyone could reasonably keep up with. Tutorials, opinions, videos, threads, newsletters, documentation, AI answers. Finding information is rarely the problem anymore.
Knowing what is worth paying attention to is harder.
The Guild is a paid membership for WordPress Builders and Developers who want to get better at the work itself: building sites, maintaining them, solving problems, improving performance, making technical decisions, and understanding why one approach makes more sense than another.
You do not need to fit a particular definition of a WordPress developer. Some members will build primarily with blocks or page builders. Others will spend most of their time in PHP, JavaScript, APIs, or WooCommerce. Some will run client sites or work inside an agency.
The common ground is taking the work seriously and wanting to understand it better.
What The Guild is
I don’t want to build another WordPress chat room.
There are plenty of communities where hundreds or thousands of people can post questions, share links, and talk about whatever happened that day. They can be useful, but that isn’t what I want The Guild to optimize for.
I want conversations to have some memory.
If we spend an hour pulling apart a difficult caching problem, a WordPress architecture decision, or a workflow that failed badly on a real project, that knowledge should remain useful six months later. Someone should be able to build on it instead of starting the same conversation again.
The same applies to courses. Finishing a course should be the beginning of applying what you learned, questioning parts of it, comparing approaches, and seeing how other people handle the same problem.
That is much closer to what I mean when I call this a guild. People doing the work, getting better at it together.
What you’ll find inside
The Guild combines structured education with ongoing discussion and practical work.
All current and future Within WP courses are included with membership. That includes larger courses such as Make WordPress Fast, as well as the smaller courses and lessons I will continue adding.
There will also be monthly sessions where we take one subject and properly pull it apart. Architecture, performance, workflows, security, WooCommerce, tooling, AI, or whatever else deserves more than a ten-minute video and a handful of hot takes.
Release Labs will look at new WordPress versions from the perspective of people who actually build and maintain sites. What changed? What is worth knowing? What can you ignore? Does anything require changing how you work?
There is a dedicated WordPress & AI space as well. I am interested in where AI genuinely makes WordPress work better, faster, or more reliable. I am much less interested in adding AI to things simply because we can.
And there will be room for members to share wins, mistakes, experiments, useful discoveries, and the occasional “we tried this and it went horribly wrong.” Those are often where the best lessons come from.
The Guild will grow over time, but I don’t want growth for its own sake. I’d rather add something because members need it than fill a roadmap with features so the membership looks bigger.
Why it is paid
The Guild will be an annual paid membership.
Part of the reason is straightforward: the courses, sessions, Release Labs, and other material take time to make, and I want to keep investing in them.
But paying for membership also puts a useful boundary around the community.
Free communities tend to optimize for reach. That often means more people, more activity, more repeated questions, and more moderation. None of those things are inherently bad. They are simply not what I am trying to build here.
I’d rather have a smaller group of people who actively want to improve their WordPress work.
The Guild does not need to be busy every hour of the day to be valuable. It needs to contain people worth asking, conversations worth returning to, and material worth spending time on.
That is a much more useful standard.
Who is this for?
The Guild is for WordPress Agencies, WordPerss Builders and Developers who already do the work and intend to keep getting better at it.
You might be an agency developer, freelancer, technical site owner, WooCommerce specialist, implementer, performance nerd, designer who builds sites, or someone whose role doesn’t fit neatly into any of those labels.
You don’t need to write custom code all day. You do need to care about what happens after clicking the button.
Why did that improve performance? Why did this architecture become difficult to maintain? Why does one site survive a traffic spike while another falls over? Why is that plugin causing trouble? What will this WordPress change mean for the sites you manage? Is the accepted best practice actually still the best choice?
Those are Guild questions.
If you’re mainly looking for shortcuts, hacks, motivational business content, or somebody to hand you a list of tools and tell you which buttons to click, this probably isn’t the right membership.
If you like understanding the reasoning behind the work, it probably is.
What happens next
The Guild will open as an annual membership once the foundations are ready and the first courses are in place.
Make WordPress Fast is already there, Cloudflare for WordPress incoming, and even the next courses are on their way.
I deliberately haven’t opened The Guild with an empty community and a long list of things I promise to make later. I want there to be something useful waiting for you on day one.
Until then, I’m using the early list to find the people this idea resonates with and to learn what they want help getting better at.
Join the list
If The Guild sounds like somewhere you’d want to spend time, join the early list below. You’ll hear from me when membership opens, and the answers you provide will help shape what I build first. No launch circus. I’ll email you when there is something worth telling you.
No spam. No launch theatrics. Just updates when The Guild is ready.