The AI tools I actually use for web development
After watching a junior dev burn hours on Gutenberg boilerplate, I finally tried the AI tools for web development everyone talks about. The two that stuck were Copilot and Cursor.
Tag: AI Assistants
Structuring WooCommerce custom fields for filtering at scale
A WooCommerce store stuffed all its product attributes into post meta, and the filters buckled under thousands of products. The fix was a custom taxonomy for the shared, filterable data.
Building a multilingual WordPress site that doesn’t break
A client tried to just translate their WooCommerce shop into German and it broke. Here is why a multilingual WordPress site needs Multisite or a plugin like WPML, and what those tools handle that manual translation cannot.
How to write WordPress AI prompts that don’t suck
A client’s AI-built WordPress site looked generic because his prompts were vague. The fix is to treat the AI like a junior developer and write a detailed brief, not a wish. Here is what that looks like.
WordPress 6.9: styling forms with theme.json
WordPress 6.9 finally lets you style core form elements from theme.json, treating textInput and select like buttons and headings. It doesn’t cover focus states yet, so here’s the hybrid theme.json plus CSS setup that works today.
Pragmatic WordPress development over perfect code
A new client’s WooCommerce checkout was throwing fatal errors after a developer rebuilt field validation from scratch. The fix was not a better library but a short function hooked into WooCommerce, and here is why that was the right call.
Writing WordPress code that stays maintainable
A WooCommerce shipping calculator was one 2,000-line file that broke every time a class was added. Refactoring it around a simple interface and small classes fixed that, and it shows how WordPress core can teach better PHP.
Integrating a fitness tracker API with WooCommerce
A client wanted WooCommerce to reward customers who hit their step goals on a fitness tracker. Making the API call on every page load fell apart fast, so here is how we synced the data with a background job and a custom table instead.
Stop writing WooCommerce queries that crash your site
I got a Slack message from one of our project managers. A client’s WooCommerce shop, a big one with thousands of products, was crawling. Product…
How debugging skills make you a better developer
A WooCommerce coupon worked for regular customers but failed for wholesale ones. Deactivating plugins got me nowhere; stepping through the code with Xdebug found a role-check bug in about 15 minutes.