I heard about this new AI-based block creation tool that Automattic made (that’s the company I work with), and I’ve been wanting to try it out for a while now.
Today was the day.
If you don’t know what WordPress blocks are, they are what you use to create content on a WordPress site. Paragraphs of text, galleries, embedded YouTube videos, menus…these are all blocks that you add to a site. In order to add new blocks you need to use a plugin, which you can think of like the software/apps/services you use on your computer/phone/browser, except they run on a website and their purpose is to add new features and, you guessed it, blocks. There are tens of thousands of plugins available for WordPress and many of them require payment to use as they can be huge and complex and require a lot of support and maintenance. Entire companies are built around selling plugins and they typically require a little to a lot of coding skills, but times are a changin’. I see you vibe coding.
Anyway, I had an idea for a little block that could make favorite music posts better, inspired by one of my colleagues who did something similar for their reading list.
See, I post my favorite albums regularly, and one of the things that I’d like to have is a section at the top that shows the album cover art for each album that I feature. From there, you could click on each one to go to the little summary about the album, or get to their Bandcamp page or website.
Simple right?
Creating that kind of thing kind of sucks right now, as I have to search for each album, find decent artwork, download it, upload it, add it to the post…it takes ages.
So, let’s see if Telex can help me with this by creating a block, and then packaging it up as a plugin that I can add to my site. Here is what I started with in terms of a prompt:
I want a block that shows a grid of album cover art for my favorite albums of the month each month. I typically have a list of 5-10 albums, so I’d like the album cover art to be displayed in a mosaic fashion that adapts to the number of albums automatically. The images should be from a source that is reliable and won’t likely change.
After adding this prompt, a block was indeed created! I went through quite a few adjustments and tweaks by specifying additional settings and specifications, each time the tool rebuilt my block and improved things. It wasn’t perfect, as there were a few times I needed to re-prompt or just ask it to restart that feature from scratch. After some back-and-forth, the block created allowed me to specify a an artist and album, find the album cover artwork, and specify a custom link for each cover. I also added some customization and formatting controls. I’m pretty impressed with myself!
Overall, it looks basically the same as what Jordan did over on their site, but it certainly felt like magic to be able to do everything so easily. Check out how it looks over on my My top 10 albums of 2025 post.
Here is the plugin if you want to download it but what’s the fun in that? You should try Telex out yourself and see what you can build.
Comments welcome!