What I Worked On in October 2026: A Theme Shop, a Site Rebuild and 300 Commits

October was the month I turned matthummel.com from a portfolio into a shop. I put my first WordPress theme up for sale, rebuilt most of the site around it, published eight Journal posts, started a YouTube channel, and shipped more than 300 commits across four public repos. This is my first WordPress developer monthly update: what I worked on, with links, so you can check the work rather than take my word for it.

The short version of this WordPress developer monthly update

• Cobble & Candle, my theme for restaurants, taverns and inns, went from 1.0 to 1.5.1 and is now for sale. That has its own post.
• matthummel.com got a round of updates so it works as a shop as well as a portfolio.
• Writing: eight Journal posts, mostly about WordPress 7.1 and 7.2 and working with AI tools.
• Tooling: a public AI dev standards playbook, a documentation site for the theme, and a redone GitHub profile.
• Direction: WordPress first. The Power Platform work is retired and the public profiles say so.

Updates to matthummel.com

I kept updating the site all month. The biggest change is that you can now buy a theme here, so the site picked up a shop and the pages that go with selling software. The Journal and Projects pages got cleaner, light mode got a proper accessibility pass, and my newsletter moved to Hostinger Reach. If you want every detail, the changelog lists each release.

Cobble & Candle, in one paragraph

Eighteen releases between November 1 and 8. Freemius licensing, a preflight check that explains a bad host instead of white-screening, a Theme Settings screen that replaces the setup wizard, plain edit forms for dishes, events and rooms, a full Journal with newsletter sign-ups, menus guests can search and filter by allergen, Google Fonts served from your own site, a Support tab with a ticket form, and three accessibility releases. The full write-up has the details and the price. The demo runs the same zip buyers get.

What I wrote

Eight posts went out between October 8 and 24, after the Cobble & Candle post on October 3.

• Should You Still Learn to Code in 2026? What AI Changed (and What It Didn’t)
• WordPress 7.2 Beta 1: What Changed for Developers
• WordPress 7.2: Release Date, Features, and What to Test
• Why I Built a Claude Code Playbook for WordPress
• Website Basics for New Developers and Business Owners
• WordPress MCP Adapter: Connect Claude Code and Cursor to Your Site
• Acreline: A WordPress Theme for Real Estate Agents and Brokers
• What’s New in WordPress 7.1.3: Security Fixes Explained

Most of these are cross-posted to DEV.to with the canonical link pointing back here.

Tooling I made public

AI dev standards playbook

I kept typing the same instructions into Claude Code on every project: WordPress coding standards, escaping rules, how I want a Sage theme laid out, which docs to check. So I put the rules, skills and commands in one public repo, ai-dev-standards-playbook, with a GitHub Pages site built from the files themselves. Version 1.0 landed on October 11. Since then it picked up WCAG 2.2 rules, a documentation-references skill, and a Sage project skill with commands to start a new theme and run the dev server. I wrote about why I built it.

Cobble & Candle documentation

The owner guides moved into their own public repo, wp-cobbleandcandle-docs, on October 28. The theme’s Support tab reads them from there, so a fix to a guide reaches every site without a theme update. There are 19 guides now, from getting started to webhooks.

GitHub profile

My profile README was rebuilt to match the dark header on matthummel.com: what I build, the stack as an animated SVG, the four newest projects pulled from the site by a scheduled Action, and a heatmap that refreshes itself. The Power Platform references are gone. It says WordPress, and it means it.

Video

I started a YouTube channel, @matthummelwpdev, for short videos on WordPress development, AI tools, marketing and SEO. The first script came from the playbook post. I tried a synthetic voice first and then recorded my own, and built a small browser teleprompter to do it. The channel has no audience yet. I am fine with that for now.

What did not get done

• WalkRidge and Acreline are still sample work, not products. Each needs the same release process Cobble & Candle went through.
• The Cobble & Candle landing page still describes version 1.0.1. It needs the 1.5 feature list and numbers.
• The Terms and Privacy changes have not had a lawyer’s read.
• No customer reviews yet, because there are no customers yet. That is the honest state of a shop that opened this week.

What is next

Get Cobble & Candle in front of inn and restaurant owners, write the next WordPress developer monthly update at the end of November, keep writing about WordPress 7.2 as it ships, and keep the site honest about what is for sale and what is not. If you run a restaurant, inn or agency and want to talk about any of this, send me a note. If you are hiring, the hire page is current.