The plugins people call me about

Twelve years building on it, which is long enough to have written custom gateways, custom shipping methods, tiered B2B pricing engines, product configurators and order sync against two different ERPs — and long enough to have inherited all of those built badly by someone else.

Most of my WooCommerce work is not "build me a shop". It is a shop that already exists, already takes money, and now has to do something it was not designed for without the orders stopping.

Recurring billing is the least forgiving thing in WordPress. A bug in a contact form annoys somebody; a bug in renewals silently loses revenue for a month before anybody notices, and by then the failed payments have already churned.

I have built or repaired subscription systems seven times — Progressive Christianity, Informed Citizen, Sparketh, ICL Society, and three more. Three of those involved moving live subscribers onto it from something else without interrupting billing.

A capable plugin that a lot of sites eventually outgrow — or are forced off when a payment gateway integration they depend on gets deprecated. I have run that migration twice under exactly that pressure, and maintained a third site where staying put was the right answer.

The hard part is never the member records. It is that the recurring billing lives at the gateway, not in WordPress, and the obvious migration path cancels every subscription you have.

Multilingual is one of those things that looks like a configuration task and turns out to be an architecture decision. At ICL Society it runs nine languages — English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic — on top of a six-tier membership system, which is where it stops being simple.

Arabic means right-to-left, which means every layout assumption gets tested. Multilingual plus commerce, or multilingual plus memberships, roughly doubles the cost of every other change you make afterwards. Worth knowing before you commit, not after.

ACF is how most of my custom themes get their structure — field groups, repeaters, flexible content, and increasingly ACF Blocks for the Gutenberg editor, where one PHP template serves the front end, the editor preview and the structured data output all at once.

Worth knowing that ACF's ownership changed and that WordPress.org now ships a fork called Secure Custom Fields. If you are on WP Engine you almost certainly have ACF Pro bundled; if you are elsewhere it is worth checking which one you are actually running before anyone builds on top of it.

Course delivery, gated content, assessments, and the part most people underestimate — what happens when the certificate at the end has professional consequences. At The ObG Project medical professionals bought credits into a wallet, completed assessments, and the system issued the document they submitted for specialisation renewal, under HIPAA constraints and with SCORM compatibility.

Six projects across LMS and membership, most of them combining courses with commerce, which is where the two systems start disagreeing about who has access to what.

Community and member profiles behind gated professional content at iSixSigma. Honest scope: one substantial project rather than a specialism, and I would say the same on a call. If your whole product is a community platform there are people who live in BuddyPress more than I do.

Where I am useful is the seam — BuddyPress sitting alongside memberships, subscriptions or an LMS, which is where most of the awkward bugs live.

Builder sites can be made considerably faster than they usually are, and I get called to do it — often when a site has slowed down as it grew, or when it needs to do something the builder was not designed for.

Most of the gain comes from a handful of specific changes rather than another optimization plugin: stopping the builder loading where it is not needed, reducing DOM depth, replacing addon packs with lightweight custom widgets, and getting the caching layers right. More on that here →