Pressed Bundles let customers order managed WordPress hosting with a pre-installed, pre-configured theme — a fully functional website ready to customize instead of a blank WordPress installation. I was the lead developer responsible for automating the installation of several dozen WordPress themes, which required building custom WP-CLI plugins for themes that didn’t support standard installation flows.
The bundling process used Capybara to drive a headless browser through the WordPress installation, simulating the manual steps a user would take: activating the theme, installing required plugins, importing demo content, and configuring settings. Each theme had its own quirks — some needed specific plugin activation order, others required demo content imports that only worked through the WordPress admin UI. I wrote custom WP-CLI commands to handle the cases that couldn’t be automated through the browser.
I also led the integration into the Rails billing system (Helix), including the customer order UI where users selected themes, the backend provisioning pipeline that triggered bundle installation after payment, and the record-keeping that tracked which bundle was installed on which site.
This concept — pre-built WordPress site packages — carried through the entire WWWH→Pressed→Envato arc. It evolved into Bender Builds (more automated, CI-driven) and then Author Managed Designs (self-service for theme authors).