Gary Jones

Gary Jones is a UK-based WordPress Engineer, code consultant, and proud father of twins. Driven by a passion for excellence, he created elegant WordPress plugins and theme solutions for clients, and provided services, including code audits, for other designers and developers. He has worked on projects for SiteGround, Yoast, StudioPress, Web Savvy Marketing, Daniels Trading, Rolls-Royce and many smaller design and development agencies and individuals.

Gary is a key contributor to the Genesis Framework and has contributed to most major branches of WordPress Core since 3.3. He has contributed to many open source projects in the community, and is a co-host on the UK Genesis podcast.

A former teacher in schools and prisons, Gary’s goal is to educate WordPress professionals on how they can improve their code. His motto is knowledge is power.

About Gary Jones

I'm a Customer Experience AI Engineer in the enterprise WordPress space, currently figuring out how AI fits into the way our support and engineering teams actually do their jobs at WordPress VIP. Most of my recent work sits at the intersection of three things: AI inside engineering and support operations, the open-source plugins our customers rely on, and the community that holds the WordPress ecosystem together. On the AI side, I've been exploring how AI agents and MCP servers can connect to the operational tools support teams use day-to-day, from scheduling and coverage through to triage. There's still a lot to learn here. On the plugin side, I review and merge contributions to VIP-owned WordPress plugins used by tens of thousands of sites. Earlier this year I helped launch customerhub.wpvip.com, a community hub for our enterprise customers. On the community side, as of WP 7.0 I've contributed to 29 of the last 39 WordPress core releases, I'm a General Translation Editor for British English on translate.wordpress.org, and I'm an organiser for WordCamp Europe (Basel 2025, Krakow 2026). I'm also a named contributor on PSR-5, the PHPDoc standard. Before VIP, I ran my own agency for ten years, was a long-standing contributor to the Genesis Framework, and co-hosted the UK Genesis Podcast. Earlier than that, I taught maths and IT, including a stint as a team leader for prison education. The teaching instinct still drives a lot of what I do.