Weeknotes #2: WPChangeSync, Elementor layoffs, Core Framework open source and the BEM debate

Welcome back to Weeknotes, edition #2. Another week of WordPress, page builders and AI all sprinting in slightly different directions. No grand thesis again, just the stuff that actually caught my attention. Let’s get into it.

BricksSync is now WPChangeSync, and 2.0 is live

The tool formerly known as BricksSync has grown up. It’s been rebranded to WPChangeSync, and version 2.0 is now live as the first stable public release, since the 1.x line was still in beta. The new name tells the whole story: this is no longer a Bricks-only affair.

If you move WordPress changes between staging and production, site to site, or within a Multisite, this is built for you. It transfers your builder templates, global styles, field definitions, plugin settings and content as clean, Git-friendly JSON, however you like to work. That ranges from manual, file-based Git workflows to direct transfers between sites, and even multi-step release workflows with approval gates. You can preview every change, push exactly what you mean to, and roll back if anything looks off. No full database dumps, and no copy-and-pasting at 11pm before a release.

Launch offer: take 30% off any plan with code LAUNCH30OFF at checkout, good through 31 July 2026. Grab it at wpchangesync.com/pricing.

The headline changes in 2.0:

• Builder-agnostic. Bricks is still first-class, but Gutenberg and other WordPress content are supported now too.
• Custom integrations. Point it at almost any plugin’s data and sync it yourself, no code required.
• A growing directory of supported plugins and themes.

Already a BricksSync customer? Your licence carries straight over, so there’s nothing to re-buy. Just run an update from your dashboard.

Elementor lays off 30%, and it’s not (only) about AI

Calcalist reported that Elementor cut 100 jobs, around 30% of its workforce, with the company framing it as AI reshaping how websites get built. CEO Yoni Luksenberg said they “underestimated the speed of technological disruption.”

There’s a currency angle sitting underneath that, though. There was a mention in the Dynamic WordPress Facebook Community that the company earns in US dollars but pays much of its team in Israeli Shekels, which has pushed costs up by roughly 30% year on year for the same headcount. So it reads like both things at once: AI pressure on the product and a real margin squeeze from the exchange rate.

Layoffs are never nice to hear. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Core Framework is going open source, and its makers are building a CMS

Core Framework is going open source. David Babinec has announced that the framework and its builder extensions will become free and live on GitHub, while the template packs stay as a premium option on the website. I caught this via David McCan in the Dynamic WordPress Facebook group, who is a reliable voice for this kind of news.

The reason is a tough one: sales are down around 80% this year, partly down to AI and partly because it has always been a fairly niche product. It’s bittersweet. Open-sourcing can be a real gift to the community and a second life for a project, but an 80% drop is a hard backdrop to arrive at it. I hope it thrives, because I loved a lot of the Bricks-integrated features like the auto-BEM, even if plenty of those ideas ended up absorbed into Bricks natively anyway.

More intriguingly, the same team is channelling their energy into something new: a static builder called Instatic. Paul from WPTuts covered it in one of his latest videos titled First Look at Instatic | The New Alpha Visual Builder, and it’s worth a look. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

A livestream with Lex: Builderius vs Etch

I had a genuinely fun livestream with Lex from TechiesReviews this week, where we picked apart the workflow differences between Builderius and Etch. Following on from my Etch first impressions last week, it was great to compare notes with someone who has more experience with these tools.

The interesting bit wasn’t which one is “better”. It’s how each has something nice that the other can adopt. For example, Builderius has a nice visual dynamic data picker and autocomplete for classes and variables, while Etch has a nice UI, a command palette and context menu, and the ability to turn different parts of the interface on or off. I would really like the ability to turn off the visual CSS UI in Builderius, but I can see how it benefits visual designers.

Is BEM still worth it with modern CSS?

There’s been a good debate rumbling this week about whether BEM still earns its place now that modern CSS has caught up. With native nesting, cascade layers and @scope, a lot of the specificity and encapsulation problems BEM was invented to solve can now be handled by the language itself. So do we still need the double-underscore, double-hyphen naming discipline?

My honest take: BEM was never really about the tooling. It was about making the structure legible at a glance. @scope and nesting solve the cascade problem beautifully, but they don’t automatically make a class name tell you what it is and where it belongs. I think we’ll see BEM soften rather than disappear: lean on native scoping for isolation, and keep just enough naming convention to stay readable. Etch still retains its one-click BEM class generator, so the pattern clearly isn’t dead yet.

In the visual development environment, where we have more component-based workflows, we may see less need for BEM naming, as Dave Foy mentioned on YouTube.

Novamira Visual lets you watch the AI build, live

The Novamira team introduced something genuinely fun this week: Novamira Visual in version 1.8+ free and 1.6+ pro. Instead of firing off a prompt and waiting to see what lands, you can now watch the AI agent build live inside the page builder, with elements appearing, styles applying, and the layout taking shape in real time.

It sounds like a gimmick until you use it, and then it clicks. Seeing the agent work turns the whole thing from a black box into something you can actually follow and course-correct. You spot a wrong turn as it happens rather than picking through the result afterwards, and (I’ll admit it) watching a layout assemble itself in front of you is oddly satisfying.

And Claude Fable 5 is back, briefly

Small thing that made me smile this week: Claude Fable 5 is back, at least for a little while. Anthropic has opened a promotional window from 1 to 7 July, letting Pro, Max and Team subscribers run up to half of their weekly limits on Fable 5 at no extra cost. There is nothing to claim or activate; if you are on a paid plan, it is simply there. If you lean on Claude in your build-with-AI workflow, it is a good week to put Fable 5 through its paces before the window closes on the 7th (and if you are in Claude Code, make sure you are on version 2.1.170 or later). The full details are in Anthropic’s announcement.

That’s a wrap

BricksSync grew up into WPChangeSync, Elementor trimmed its team under pressure from both AI and the exchange rate, and Core Framework is opening up. At the same time, its makers dream of a new CMS in Instatic, Lex and I compared builder philosophies, BEM lived to fight another release of CSS, Novamira let us watch the AI build in real time, and Fable 5 came back for an encore. Not a bad week at all. If any of this sparked a thought, I’d love to hear it. See you in the next one.