WordPress & PHP Craft

“Freelance WordPress Wrangler @ yourdesign.co.za”

2023 cover letter

What this looks like for me

WordPress is the craft I’ve been practising longest. The yourdesign.co.za era is 20+ years of small-to-medium business sites, custom themes (not page builders), custom post types, plugin development, WooCommerce work, agency sub-contracts (Nimue Skin Technology, Woolworths Mother’s Day campaign, via Flume). That’s the base layer.

The current example is WeCoza 3.0, the less visible end of the same craft: a plugin for a South African adult-education training provider where most of the operational logic doesn’t live in PHP at all. It lives in a 43-table Postgres schema running alongside the WordPress install, reached by a PDO connection rather than $wpdb. Business invariants (state transitions on classes, audit trails, a two-phase notification engine) are enforced by plpgsql triggers, with the plugin acting as a thin UI and integration layer. There’s a hand-maintained DBML file so the client can read the schema without SQL, and a 14-month paper trail of meeting notes, PDFs, and PRDs in the repo alongside the code.

A lot of the value in this kind of work isn’t the framework. It’s the domain model: getting the schema right, picking the invariants, and working with the client’s actual objects (learners, agents, classes, sites with parent-child hierarchy, collections, QA visits) rather than WordPress’s defaults.

Projects that back this

• wecoza_development: WP plugin + 43-table Postgres backend, plpgsql triggers, two-phase notification engine, 14-month client paper trail.
• yourdesign.co.za: freelance portfolio covering 20+ years of WordPress / WooCommerce / PHP work, including Nimue Skin Technology and Woolworths.

Decisions that shaped how I do it

• Why Postgres alongside WordPress, not instead of it: invariants in plpgsql; operational data that should survive the CMS.

Playbooks I use here

• Playwright E2E tests for a WordPress plugin: session caching, destructive-action defence at two layers, shortcode-map as the URL registry; the shape I run against WeCoza.
• Translating technical fixes for non-technical clients: two paragraphs, zero jargon, a commit SHA, a Trello tag; the template behind 14 months of WeCoza updates.

What I’m usually asked to do

• Build a custom WordPress plugin or theme with operational logic that extends beyond CMS use
• Pair a WordPress install with a dedicated Postgres / MySQL backend for real-world business data
• Design a schema against a client’s actual objects rather than WordPress’s post-and-meta default
• Maintain a long-running client site through requirements, migrations, and schema changes