Big news: I’ve updated my WordPress Theme Cellula to version 1.1. This is quite an unexpected release on my side. To be perfectly honest I wasn’t planning for it until I noticed a pull request from a contributor that was waiting for approval… since 2024. Ouch.
Talk about “taking your time,” huh.
For this release I’ve added several changes and features I’ve been mulling over for a while, like an improved default stylesheet, a more robust page layout and more importantly, a build pipeline, in order to make it easier to improve and update the theme in the future.
The most apparent improvement is the minification step, of course. Given the unique challenge at hand, there was basically no pre-existing tool available for PHP minification, forcing me to write my own library. You can find it in scripts/minify.php. Needless to say that it’s not… particularly brilliant code, but it gets the job done. Also, there’s a small confession I to do regarding this tool. It’s the only part of the project where Claude Code was used.
I know, I know. Generative AI is morally ambiguous, it consumes a boatload of energy, and let’s be honest, it’s also sort of cheating, man. And like good old game cheats, it’s better to use it as sporadically as possible, kinda like when I go look for a walkthrough if I’m stuck for too long on a puzzle in an adventure game.
AI usage for my projects is a topic that probably needs a more extensive and serious discussion than this post. That’s definitely something to talk about for an article in the future. For now though, here’s what I have to say about the usage of AI in Cellula: it was solely used for fixing some gnarly issues in the PHP parsing code in minify.php. No AI was actually used while developing or designing the theme itself.
This may sound rather hypocritical I guess; prompting Claude Fable with “Write the smallest WordPress theme ever” would’ve probably generated a more optimized final result than my own code. But where’s the fun in that, right?
Squeezing every byte from index.php was indeed a fun endeavor. Excluding some major oversight on my part, I guess there’s very little room for further…downsizing the theme without ultimately compromising the end-user experience. Overall, the final build is less than 3Kbyte – 2995 bytes to be exact.
I hope you enjoy Cellula in the current form. Hopefully it won’t take a 2-years old pull request for a new release.
You can download the final minified build from its Github release page. And if you feel reeeally generous, you can buy me a coffee from the following link: