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Salute Your Cursor AI Overlords
I’m not sure yet, but I’m pretty close to sure that AI can’t do anything genuinely complicated when it comes to writing code. Or, more accurately, it’s happy to do immensely complicated code creation, but most of the complex stuff doesn’t work and is more trouble than it’s worth to fix. But a recent return…
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Client variation management
A key capability PeakZebra needs to develop moving forward is something that, strangely, doesn’t quite exist in WordPress. The capability: completely manage revision control across entire sites (that is, anything at all that changes on a site) and be able to scale to do it across a large number of sites (several thousand, say). At…
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Slots to Slotfill, Callbacks to Call
So, one key challenge to tackle is managing changes to individual PeakZebra deployments without creating variants that can’t be merged back together. My initial thought was the WordPress slotfill capability, probably because I was aware of it but didn’t know all that much about it. I did a little poking around, enough to realize that…
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The Launch List
I continue to chew through a lot of time making sure that PeakZebra, as a service, works. That it does what it’s supposed to do. But I’ve come to realize that one of my major challenges as a founder is training myself not to keep moving the “finished and ready for launch” goalposts. In particular,…
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The WordPress Version Control Divide
I was checking out a podcast video by Brian Coords when I hit upon an exchange that both outlined the difference between a developer/workflow-based approach and a more traditional WordPress approach to managing changes on websites. What I love about this conversation is that both interlocutors are obviously not only smart, but smart about WordPress.…
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Another Side of WordPress SaaS
One thing about the strategy where you hedge your WordPress bets by offering your wares as a SaaS built on WordPress is that it opens up the question of what’s in your SaaS. Once you’ve created a setup where your SaaS customers are interacting with your WordPress server, a potential next step is to incorporate…
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Common Codebase Versus Custom Deployments
These days I’m spending a lot of my time making sure the PeakZebra product works. But it’s clear to me that quite possibly the biggest challenge I have before me is dealing with the dead certainty that there will be lots of customizations made to client instance of PeakZebra. In a way, that’s PeakZebra’s secret…
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The Limits of Open Source Software
Nothing has foregrounded the fundamental bargain of open source like the past couple months of WordPress drama. I’m not here to talk about that in particular, but it has really gotten people thinking about what’s legal, what’s ethical, what you can charge for, what you can give away, and how a business will or won’t…
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Adding Logic Cleanly
With the WordPress block editor, you get a reasonably good editor for managing the pieces that make up a typical web page. And that can include things like forms and interactive charts and so on. For that reason, PeakZebra uses the block editor as the interface for any clients that want to build or customize…
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Adjustments in Thinking
It occurred to me that I was writing lots of blog posts and posting links to the posts on Bluesky and X. And there were even a couple of good souls clicking through to have a look at the proceedings. But on the blog pages (aka, pages like this) there was no call to action…
