A shoutout to Rino de Boer, a designer and developer from Rotterdam. For about seven years he taught Elementor and used it almost daily for client work. He made tutorials, defended it against the trendy new page builders and even built his own toolkit plugin for it. If anyone was an Elementor guy, it was Rino.

And then he announced he was leaving Elementor. Not WordPress, just the page builder. That takes guts. When you have built your name on a tool, walking away from it is scary. So why did he do it? Elementor 4 came with big delays and lots of bugs. And his clients were simply unable to use it. That led him to a clear decision: clients should not edit layouts or design at all. They should edit content. The builder, with all its panels, breakpoints and nested containers, was suddenly in the way. And as a bonus, he could leverage the power of AI to create layouts.

That leaves a problem: if an agent writes your theme in code, how does the client change a headline? Rino did not just complain about it, he solved it. His answer is Pencil, a WordPress plugin that he released as a public prerelease this month. The idea is beautifully simple: The theme owns the design; clients edit the words and images directly on the website. The agent wraps every editable piece of text or image in a small helper function with a stable ID, like home.hero.title. The client visits the live site, clicks the pencil and types. That’s it! The design lives in code, the content lives in a separate store. The agent can rebuild the whole layout and add to it and the content survives, as long as the IDs stay the same. Every edit is logged with who, when, and the value before and after.

I love this. It is very visual and it feels close to Git: design as code, content separated from it, and a history of every change. It is the setup I have been preaching for years, and here is someone coming from the heart of the page builder world, arriving at the same place. Wonderful.

It is a prerelease, so there are some limitations. First, clients cannot create new pages. Posts and products are fine, but a new static page has to be built by the agent or the developer, even if it is very similar to an existing one. Second, the website has to be prepared for it. Pencil does not make an existing theme editable. Every editable spot has to be wired in by hand (or by agent), and if someone renames an ID, the saved content is disconnected.

With Hugo and Usecue CMS you do not have these limitations. Content is Markdown and YAML, design is templates. Nothing has to be prepared field by field: a new page is just a new Markdown file, and the existing layouts take care of the rest. And it is not close to Git, it is Git. Every edit is a commit, with real diffs and real reverts. Your AI agent can even publish for you.

But what Pencil does better is the clicking-on-the-live-page experience. That is really nice, and something I can learn from. It reminds me of what Tina and CloudCannon are doing. And while side-by-side editing is really nice, this is better. Food for thought!

So watch Rino’s video where he shows it in action, check out Pencil, give it a try and tell Rino what you think. I am really curious where he takes it next.

Happy coding!

()  Joost van der Schee