Bender Builds automated the installation of WordPress themes and plugins for Envato Hosted customers. The system let administrators bundle themes with their dependencies, providing near-instant website setup instead of a manual installation process. On the backend, Capybara drove a headless Chrome browser to simulate a full WordPress installation — installing plugins, configuring settings, and capturing screenshots — then packaged the result into deployable archives.
I worked on a large portion of the backend bundling system and integrated it into the Hosted billing system (Helix). This included adding support for multiple Envato-branded themes (Brooklyn, TheBuilt, Liber, Designr), implementing the Helix callback system so builds could report status back to the billing platform, and improving the screenshot pipeline. The build process ran on CircleCI, with results fed back to Helix for coordination.
Bender was part of the broader Pressed Bundles lineage — the concept of pre-built WordPress site packages that carried through from Pressed into the Envato acquisition, where it became a key part of the managed WordPress hosting offering.