April in review, and the first days of May

A small personal note before the work part.

Same bridge, 35 years apart. First time with my parents at 9. Last week with my own kids.

April was one of the heaviest build months Respira has had. It overlapped with the lightest, most grounding week i've had this year. Both things are true at the same time.

Now the work.

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April closed with 70 tagged releases across the plugin, the MCP server, the WooCommerce add-on, Respira Lite, and a brand-new CLI. The catalog crossed 240 tools. Flatsome joined as builder #12. Six builders now have Deep Intelligence. ACF landed with 54 dedicated tools, which means roughly two million WordPress sites can be edited natively by AI for the first time.

The first five days of May then turned a lot of that inward and outward at the same time. The dashboard got rebuilt from the chrome up. The homepage got live telemetry that refreshes every 60 seconds. A free WCAG scanner moved into the dashboard so any logged-in user can paste a URL and get a report back. The affiliate program stopped going through a third party.

This post is the long version. May first, because that's the freshest, and then April, because that's what made any of it possible.

"I reported five edge-case bugs against Respira on a complex WordPress + Breakdance setup. Mihai shipped patches for all five inside 36 hours, each one targeted at a specific trace I'd captured. He treated my hex dumps as the spec and wrote tests against Breakdance's own predicates, which is a level of vendor rigor I rarely see. He earned my loyalty and the long-term relationship."

— Drew G., professional services firm

The first five days of May

A dashboard you'd actually want to come back to

The whole /dashboard got rebuilt across 11 sequential phases on a single shared chrome. New sidebar with the Respira wordmark in the brand typography. New topbar with a notifications dropdown, a workspace pill, and a theme toggle. Real light/dark mode that respects existing components. A working ⌘K command palette wired to the sidebar search.

Page by page, the things that actually mattered:

• /dashboard (index). Your real billing numbers, a "what's new from Respira" feed, and a "my activity (30d)" strip showing edits, snapshots, and sites at a glance instead of buried in admin.
• /dashboard/billing. Real usage data, real subscription management, sparkline current-value dot. No more guessing whether the number on screen is real or stale.
• /dashboard/downloads. Skills filter tabs and a clean cleanup pass.
• /dashboard/skills. New in-app surface for the open-source skills.
• /dashboard/accessibility. See below.
• /dashboard/partner. See further below.

Live telemetry on the public homepage

Land on respira.press and the hero now shows a live console: tools called per second, edits in the last 24h, the top 5 tools by velocity, and a grid of which AI agents are doing the editing right now (Claude, Cursor, Codex). Refreshes every 60 seconds.

The full-screen version lives at respira.press/live with a 45-day usage trend chart and Pulse cells.

The point isn't the chart. The point is: a visitor lands on the marketing site and immediately sees the platform breathing. Not screenshots. Not testimonials. Real activity from real customers, refreshed while they're reading.

A free WCAG scanner anyone can run

/dashboard/accessibility shipped on May 5. Paste any public URL, get an accessibility report scoped to WCAG 2.1 AA. Free for any logged-in Respira user. Reports are shareable via URL. Backed by the existing PageSpeed integration so there's nothing extra to wire up on your end.

If you've been considering Respira for accessibility work specifically, this is the surface to start with.

Demo videos as a first-class category

Two new screencasts are live:

• /demo/divi5. A full HTML-to-Divi-5 barbershop landing page tutorial.
• /demo/claude-chrome-webmcp. A three-minute walkthrough of Claude editing a live Divi 5 site through Chrome WebMCP, no manual editing.

The blog now has a "Demo videos" category with a featured slot on /blog pointing at the latest one. More are queued.

Per-site one-click install for every supported AI client

The Connected Sites table on /dashboard/mcp got a "One-click install" column with per-row buttons for Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex, and Claude Code. Each button mints a scoped install that only knows about that one site, so you don't accidentally hand an agent the keys to your whole portfolio.

Sign the manifesto, get an extra trial day

If you sign the manifesto, your trial extends by 24 hours automatically. A small loop, but the kind of small loop that turns a one-page site into a working product surface.

A new affiliate program, in-house

/dashboard/partner is no longer a third-party affiliate wrapper. It's an in-house program with performance-tier commissions: 10% on your first sale, 15% from sale 2, 30% from sale 11, 50% from sale 101. Tiers auto-evaluate on every paid conversion and the rate applies step-wise per sale. Slug claim flow, link generator, real attribution from first-touch click through paid conversion.

If you've been waiting for a reason to share Respira with your network, the program is open. Apply at /dashboard/partner.

v6.10.0 · one-click "Connect to Respira"

Shipping today (May 6) on the back of the dashboard rebuild. The license-key flow used to be: go to respira.press, find your dashboard, hunt for the key, copy it, paste it into WP admin. Customers got stuck on the "hunt for the key" step often enough that the May 5 dashboard redesign exposed the friction immediately. The fix is an OAuth-style handshake mirrored on the existing Respira CLI auth flow.

From WP admin → Respira → License, click Connect to Respira. A new tab opens at respira.press/wp-auth. Sign in (or pick the right account if you have several), confirm "Connect Respira to your-site.com?", and the license key is saved automatically. No copy. No paste. The manual respira_xxxx entry stays underneath as a fallback for anyone who prefers it or whose network blocks the popup.

The handshake is closer to OAuth than it looks:

• The license key never appears in any URL. The browser only sees an opaque single-use code; the plugin exchanges that code for the actual key over HTTPS server-to-server.
• Same-host validation on the return URL. The /wp-auth page refuses to redirect a license code to any host that doesn't match the site that announced itself in the handshake. Stops a malicious WP install from impersonating yours and stealing the code.
• Single-use code with a 10-minute TTL. Replay attacks on the callback aren't a thing.
• Explicit user approval. The CLI flow trusts the local terminal. The plugin flow asks "Connect Respira to <site>?" before issuing the code, since the WP plugin runs across many users on a single site.

Bonus: the GitHub release page workflow stopped slapping marketing boilerplate at the top of every release note. Releases from v6.10.0 forward lead with the actual changelog entry.

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April, the long version

April was the month builder coverage stopped being a roadmap and became a reality. Six builders went from "supported" to "Deep Intelligence". Flatsome shipped as #12. The CLI launched. ACF support landed in one drop.

The major releases

• v5.4 Bricks Deep Intelligence (Apr 1 to 4). 7 new Bricks tools. Cross-site element search, ACSS integration, page health checks, design system export, query loop discovery, style profile analysis, optimistic locking.
• v6.0 "Storefront" (Apr 9). Flatsome UX Builder shipped as builder #12. 15 new WooCommerce Commerce tools with storefront design intelligence, bulk pricing with snapshots, catalog health audits, natural-language product search. The full guide is at /flatsome.
• v6.1 "Elemental" (Apr 13). Elementor Deep Intelligence: 8 new tools, composite stock images, SVG upload, conversion validator, tool governance, approval system.
• v6.2 "Oxygen Deep" (Apr 13 to 14). Oxygen Deep Intelligence: 49 components, fuzzy matching, data repair, Oxygen 6 detection. Respira Lite Abilities API expanded to 32 tools (full REST API coverage discoverable through the WordPress AI Stack MCP Adapter).
• v6.3 "Breakdance Deep" (Apr 14). Breakdance Deep Intelligence: 84 elements, nesting validation, fuzzy matching, 8 patterns.
• v6.4 "Divi Presets" + v6.5 "Divi Auto-mode" (Apr 17 to 18). Locked spec for Divi 5 preset endpoints. Per-module schema endpoints. Both _presetId and inline attribute paths supported. Structured 404s with Levenshtein typo suggestions for misnamed presets.
• v6.6 "ACF" (Apr 20). 54 ACF tools covering field reads and writes, field group management, ACF Pro repeaters, flexible content, galleries, options pages, relationships, and bulk updates. Every write snapshot-backed and dry-run previewable. This one is big. ACF runs on roughly two million WordPress sites, and until April those sites had no native AI editing path.
• v6.7 "Oxygen 6" + Divi 5 Cold-Start (Apr 27). Full Oxygen 6 (Jenga) per-post storage adapter, distinct from Classic Oxygen. Plus Divi 5 starter templates and inline schemas baked into the very first respira_get_builder_info response so a fresh build doesn't need a follow-up round trip on cold start.

The full release-by-release breakdown lives at /releases.

The CLI shipped

Respira CLI v0.1.0 went live April 19. Three open-source npm packages under the respira-press org:

• @respira/cli. Terminal binary.
• @respira/sdk. TypeScript SDK.
• @respira/cli-core. Execution cycle, hooks, traces, formatter.

34 commands. Builder-native. MIT licensed. Everything routes through the same Respira tool layer the MCP server uses, so the CLI and your AI agent see the same site state.

By month-end the CLI was at v0.1.4 with cleaner empty states and clearer next-step guidance. Install it with:

npm install -g @respira/cli

Customer threads that shaped the platform

Roughly half of April's patch releases came from customer reports. The most consequential ones turned into platform-wide patterns rather than one-off fixes.

The biggest pattern was the silent-write bug class. T.H. flagged it on Bricks first: respira_inject_builder_content was returning success: true but the underlying _bricks_data meta never persisted. That same shape then surfaced on Breakdance (E.D. and M.P. both reported it), Elementor (N.M., in May), and on Cloudways (A.G.'s five-day thread, more on that below). The fix wasn't a one-line patch. It was a verify_*_meta_write_persisted() helper pattern that now runs across every adapter. If a write claims it succeeded but the storage didn't actually take, the verifier catches it and the tool returns an honest error instead of a confident lie.

The second pattern was resolve-meta-key. L. spotted that Bricks 2.x stores headers in _bricks_page_header_2 and footers in _bricks_page_footer_2 (sometimes _bricks_page_footer2), but the adapter only ever read the content key. So header and footer template editing was silently failing detection. New resolve_meta_key() branches on _bricks_template_type and the issue goes away.

The third pattern, still unfolding, is opaque host persistence. A.G.'s Cloudways/Breakdance investigation ran from May 2 through May 5 across seven plugin releases. The root cause: Breakdance core uses a pre_update_post_meta filter that re-encodes _breakdance_data into a {"tree_json_string":"<inner>"} envelope where the inner JSON's quotes are not escaped. v6.8.4 finally decoded the envelope. v6.8.6 added telemetry. v6.8.7 added native EssentialElements support. v6.9.0/9.1 added the _nextNodeId + status:"exported" io-ts shape so writes round-trip cleanly with Breakdance's editor expectations.

Other named threads that landed:

• T.P. (Apr 17). Thrive Architect product-page descriptions now propagate to the frontend. Bulk product updates were writing post_content via Woo setters but Thrive renders from its own tve_updated_post storage. The adapter syncs both now.
• D.D. (Apr 27 to 28). Divi 5 button styling normalized to canonical button.decoration.* shape. Plus the cold-start fix mentioned above.
• M.P. (May 4). Two distinct bugs in 24 hours: Oxygen 4.8.3+ prefixed meta-key migration, and a fatal in the WooCommerce add-on's class-updater on every WP cron tick. Both fixed same day.

Checkout moved to Polar

LemonSqueezy was the original payment platform. April was the month Polar became the primary checkout. New customers go through Polar. Existing LemonSqueezy customers stay on LemonSqueezy with full continuity. The dashboard's billing and admin pages handle both gracefully, including the customer-portal button that lets you manage your subscription directly.

The annual toggle now shows a "Save 34%" badge inline on the pricing page, and trial subscriptions route through Polar's trialing state with the existing 7-day window untouched.

What didn't ship

For honesty:

• Spectra and Mosaic builder support. Roadmapped late in the month after Breakdance shipped. No code yet.
• Elementor 4.0 atomic-element write support. Defensive readiness shipped early May (v6.8.1: detect, refuse, surface honestly). Full atomic writes still need either the official spec or careful reverse-engineering. Working on it.
• Beaver Builder content_field_map expansion. A trial user flagged on April 30 that Beaver Builder's map only covers 7 modules. Queued for the next release once more users hit the gap.

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By the numbers

Two flavours. The first is what the platform actually did in April, frozen at month-end. The second is the ship-log.

Respira for WordPress

Platform snapshot April 2026

Tool calls 24,802 events through Respira tools, full month UTC

Top 3

AI agents

1. 01 Claude Code 88% 13,052 calls · 146 sites
2. 02 Codex 8% 1,124 calls · 6 sites
3. 03 Cursor 5% 686 calls · 18 sites

Lines of code pushed 1.7M 1,715,824 · same metric the homepage telemetry tracks

Pages + posts edited 16,786 13,351 pages · 3,435 posts

WordPress sites bridged 280 distinct sites that ran a tool

Top 10

Tools

1. 01 update page 3,931
2. 02 update module 1,634
3. 03 update custom post 1,604
4. 04 inject builder content 1,220
5. 05 update element 1,148
6. 06 update post 1,128
7. 07 update option 798
8. 08 build page 715
9. 09 upload media 665
10. 10 create menu item 535

Top 5

Builders

1. 01 Elementor 283 37% of all active sites
2. 02 Divi 139 18% of all active sites
3. 03 Gutenberg 77 10% of all active sites
4. 04 Bricks 44 6% of all active sites
5. 05 WPBakery 27 4% of all active sites

April ship-log:

• 70 tagged releases across plugin (44), MCP server (12), Woo add-on (2), CLI (4 npm versions), Respira Lite (4)
• 479 commits to the main monorepo
• 240+ tools in the published catalog
• 12 builders supported, up from 11 (Flatsome added)
• 6 builders with Deep Intelligence (Bricks, Elementor, Oxygen, Breakdance, Divi 5, Flatsome)
• 9+ named customer hotfixes that turned into platform-wide patterns

May 1 to 5:

• 96 commits
• 16 plugin tags (v6.7.4 → v6.9.1)
• 11 dashboard redesign phases, all in one day
• 7 affiliate program phases, all in one day
• 5 named customer threads closed (N.M., L., A.G., M.P., plus a rate-limit bump)
• 2 new product surfaces on respira.press (live telemetry, in-dashboard WCAG scanner)
• 4 AI clients with per-site one-click install (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex, Claude Code)

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What's next

Honest version: i don't promise dates. April moved fast because the customer base was small enough that one solo founder could keep the feedback loop tight. That's still the shape, and it's the reason the verify-helper pattern, the resolve-meta-key pattern, and the Cloudways investigation all shipped within a week of being reported.

The things actually queued:

• Spectra and Mosaic builder integrations (probably May, depending on what surfaces from current customer threads)
• Elementor 4.0 atomic-element writes (waiting on a clearer path)
• Beaver Builder content_field_map expansion (next release)
• More demo screencasts on /demo/* for the other big builders
• Backfilled docs for the Deep Intelligence drops, especially Oxygen and Breakdance, where the knowledge has shipped faster than the docs

If you've been waiting on a specific thing, or if you just hit a bug, the fastest way in is still word@respira.press or the Discord. The named threads above all started exactly that way.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for the bug reports. And thanks for trusting your sites to a piece of software that, six months ago, didn't exist.

— Mihai
Brașov, Romania
May 5, 2026

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Building in public means showing the work, the bugs, and the customers who shaped both. If this dispatch was forwarded to you, subscribe to respira.love for the next one.