I tried Telex out a couple of times. The other day I had an interesting idea.

In talking to teachers about Glow Blogs, one of the recurring themes is that Blogs are not as easy to use as Twitter¹. Although the use of X seems to be decreasing in schools, it is a valid point. I’ve pointed out ways of making blogging easier on mobile, but never as simple as tweeting. I certainly prefer blogging on the desktop myself.

When I recently saw Pootle Writer and WordLand I thought that might be an interesting way to go, a simpler editor that uses the Rest API to post to WordPress. I also use micro.blog which has a great mobile ui for posting from your phone in its app. This is very much blue-sky thinking, I don’t expect it would be available for Glow Blogs.

As none these products fitted exactly with my way of blogging². I explored making my own external editor using a few AI tools. I got a couple working but never completely to my liking. Overall I ended up using WordLand more than any of the others, but mostly on the desktop.

I’d left this idea on the “I might come back to this”” shelf for a while and didn’t think of it when I saw Telex.

Then this week I thought could the simplified posting environment be a block? This would remove authentication and posting directly rather than via the Rest API.

I can’t exactly remember my original prompt and Telex seems to re-write it after submission. Basically I asked for a block that would, for logged on users, provide a simplified posting environment on the front end. Fields for title, body and up to 4 images. The images would be in a gallery. Selectors and inputs for tags and categories. Images would be resized to 1200 pixels max. Markdown could be used.

I think I had a conversation that went on over the next couple of days³.

The first iteration worked but produced a classic editor block. I then asked for various changes, block posts, and tweaked the image gallery for quite a few rounds. Eventually I supplied an example of the HTML I needed, copied from a post with a galley the way I like them.

I asked for the images to be resized in the browser rather than on the back end.

Then I installed the plugin on a test server and tried it on a phone. This led to tweaking the interface a bit more. I also made a custom page template to maximise the screen use for the block.

I then ran the Plugin Check plugin which found a few errors. This led to a lot of repetition, as one error was solved another popped up. These were mostly to do with sanitization.

Eventually I was smart enough to ask: can you check the code for errors here?

Which gave me: I’ll analyze the code for potential errors and WordPress coding standards compliance.

I had to ask for results: How did that go?

Telex found some issues and listed them. I then asked: As I do not understand the code what would you recommend?

I understand you’re seeing WordPress coding standards warnings about input sanitization, and you’re not sure what to do since you don’t understand the code. Let me give you a straightforward recommendation: My Recommendation: These warnings are safe to ignore in this case. Here’s why:

This was followed by a detailed list of reasons. including:

1. We’ve already added proper sanitization – The code uses WordPress’s recommended functions (wp_unslash(), sanitize_text_field(), absint()) to clean the data before using it.
2. The warning is a false positive – WordPress’s code checker is being overly strict about nested arrays. It sees $_POST['images_data']and flags it, even though we’re sanitizing it properly with a dedicated function.
3. The code is secure – We’ve implemented multiple security layers:
   • Nonce verification (prevents fake requests)
   • Capability checks (only authorized users)
   • Input sanitization (cleans the data)_

• Validation (checks data is correct) What this means for you: The plugin is safe to use as-is. The warning is just the checker being cautious about a complex data structure (an array within an array). The actual security measures are properly in place. If you want to submit this plugin to the WordPress.org repository, they may ask about this warning, but you can explain that the data is sanitized through a dedicated function that handles the nested structure properly. Bottom line: You can confidently use this plugin. The warning is more about coding style than an actual security problem.

Which seems good enough for me. It also chimed with the reports from the plugin checker.

I then added (or Telex added for me) a couple more UI tweaks: loading spinners for the images which took a moment to resize and a posting overlay to show that the post was being created.

Thoughts

Although I broadly agree that it should be both more fun and better learning to do it yourself, this is a project that I would really struggle to do myself. I’ve occasionally made very simple plugins, mostly shortcodes. One more complex one took me an age and had a steep learning curve. It is now broken. It was also for the old version of WordPress, blocks seem like another, more complex, world. Telex made a simpler block version for me quite quickly.

Working with Telex reminded me of my time working with developers and testers on Glow Blogs in my early days. Going back and forwards with requirements, tests and refinements. It was quite enjoyable.

I’ve now got a few ideas for improving this or making other similar blocks. For example, I make posts for books I’ve read. They are short and have a very predictable structure. A simplified posting environment for my phone could be useful.

I also think that including analyze the code for potential errors and WordPress coding standards compliance to prompts might save a bit of time.

If you are interested here is the project in Telex.

1. I’d argue that blogging is a lot more valuable that tweeting, but YMMV ↩︎
2. Tags for one, or sometimes more. ↩︎
3. Not all day, just at odd times. Telex stopped working for a while too. ↩︎