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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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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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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…
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Daily Dose?
It occurred to me that I’m so bad at thinking up witty little bits to post on Bluesky that I’d probably do better writing a five-hundred-word piece literally every day and then “skeeting” (as they say on Bluesky, though I have no idea why) the address and topic. I’d have something to say, sort of.…
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PeakZebra’s central architectural ideas
While your first encounter with PeakZebra may catch you a little off guard, especially if you’re coming from a WordPress background, the ideas behind it are actually very straightforward. Which is what makes them powerful, of course. Particularly in the WordPress world, there’s this notion of an add-on called a “forms package.” A forms package…
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Best WordPress Blocks Plugins to Push Your Gutenberg Imagination
Gutenberg arrived on the WordPress scene five years ago by now, but plugins that implement more-than-basic blocks were relatively slow in coming. Still, five years: so you might think everyone would have it all figured out by now. But no. And plugins that implement more-than-basic blocks were relatively slow in coming. For one thing, there’s…
