A developer with a clean WooCommerce plugin sold almost nothing in six months. The problem wasn’t his checkout or his code. Nobody knew who he was, because he kept writing for other developers instead of the people with the problem.
A client wanted an auto-updating copyright block they could edit in the Site Editor. Instead of a full React build, I tried Automattic’s Telex and had an installable plugin in about five minutes. Here’s how it went and where the tool fits.
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.
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.
A client had a WooCommerce checkout throwing random 500 errors while a 200MB debug log told them nothing. Here is the custom error logging setup I used to catch, count, and get alerted on new errors.
A client site was grinding to a halt because a plugin forced an MVC structure onto WordPress. Why that fights the platform, and why hooks and filters are the WordPress way.
A client’s WooCommerce product filter kept timing out. The fix was not a faster query but a custom taxonomy, and the real story is about designing instead of copy-pasting.
A tangled inventory plugin had hooks and direct class calls everywhere. Treating the WordPress Plugin API as the mediator, with hooks in a dedicated subscriber class, keeps the core logic clean and testable.
A client running Bedrock sites updated by hand and worried about missed patches. I set up Dependabot and CircleCI so Composer updates get opened, tested, and deployed automatically.
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…