On Monday, October 19, I organized WordPress Brasil Meetup Online: #06 Behind the Scenes of WordPress Projects, where I invited people from the community to share details about some interesting projects they worked on. Here are the projects that were shared:
I shared a project where the challenge was to have the content managed inside WordPress and exported as static files (JSON) to an external file server. This way, content requests from an external app wouldn’t affect the website’s load, and if the website went down, the app would still be able to access the content. I plan to write a post to share more about this.
Guga Alves shared a custom panel he uses to manage a WooCommerce store, which has all the relevant information and actions organized in a way that speeds up its management. He also shared how he redesigned his personal website, using Google Stitch to create the design and generate a DESIGN.md file, which he then used in Cursor to create a hybrid theme (block + classic), together with a DEV.md file with some instructions on how the files should be structured. In this redesign, he stopped using a lot of plugins and created his own versions to solve the problems he had, without the bloat, like features to optimize images (using native WP functions), add an estimated reading time to posts, forms, and SEO (with llms.txt, Open Graph, sitemap, …). He also created a game on the 404 page with Caramelo, the mascot of the Brazilian WordPress Community, and shared some of the process. For his newsletter he created an integration with Resend, and for coding he recommends Google AI Studio. He also suggested OpenDesign, an open-source alternative to Claude Design.
Thaís de Lima shared a presentation about the most common security issues she has encountered in hacked websites and the process she used to clean up some recent ones using Claude, along with some of the challenges she faced while doing it. She also shared that for simple websites she replaces the contact form with a WhatsApp link, so the form can’t be exploited, which I thought was a really good idea.
Rudá Almeida shared a Python script he uses to maintain a large number of websites, which runs a series of WP-CLI commands to make sure everything is set up the way it should be. Some of the actions were: update the admin_email, remove plugins not on the allow list, install required plugins, and so on. Initially I thought having some sort of check before some actions would make sense, but then he shared that the check took as long as the update itself, so it was faster to skip this step.
We had around 19 people online, and the event lasted almost two and a half hours. The interaction was really great: every person who shared their behind-the-scenes story received a lot of questions. While this was awesome, I was expecting each person to take less time, and unfortunately, three other people I invited weren’t able to speak. But they were kind enough to present in a round 2 that is already scheduled for November 16th (where I already planned for each person to have a LOT more time).
Thanks to Guga Alves, Rudá Almeida, and Thaís de Lima for sharing your projects and answering all the questions, and thanks to everyone who joined the event. See you next month!
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