Hey — founder here.

We run FotoOwl (photo delivery for studios). Over the last year the same complaint kept coming up from wedding/event photographers:

Their “CRM” is basically WhatsApp + Instagram DMs + phone calls. They try a normal CRM, hate typing everything in after every chat, skip updates during peak season, then the CRM is empty and useless.

So we built FotoOwl CRM around that reality instead of fighting it.

What it does differently:

• Agents pull context from WhatsApp / Instagram / calls and update the lead record (name, date, budget, venue, etc.)
• Optional follow-ups so a quote that gets “seen” and then ghosts doesn’t just die in chat
• Still studio-controlled — not a bot spam machine

We’re opening early access for photography studios (esp. wedding/event) who want to try it before a wider launch.

No link in this post on purpose. If you’re a studio owner / ops person and this sounds useful, DM me and I’ll share details.

Happy to answer questions in the comments too — including “how is this different from X” without trash-talking anyone.

I’ve been working on a WordPress plugin called PostGate, and the mods allow promotional posts when properly tagged, so I wanted to share what I’ve built and hopefully get some feedback from other WordPress users.

The idea behind PostGate is pretty simple: what if you want to charge for access to WordPress content, but don’t need an entire membership or e-commerce system to do it?

For example, maybe you want most of your blog to remain free, but charge $5 for an in-depth article. Or offer a monthly subscription to a premium category. Or keep the introduction of a tutorial public and put the rest behind a paywall.

That’s the use case I built PostGate around.

Everything is managed from WordPress, while Stripe handles the actual checkout.

What it currently does:

• Protect individual posts and pages
• Protect entire categories, taxonomies, post types, or the whole site
• Lock only specific Gutenberg blocks while keeping the rest of the article public
• Sell individual content with one-time Stripe payments
• Offer recurring subscriptions
• Offer one-time purchase + subscription options on the same paywall
• Keep a configurable public preview before the paywall
• Restrict content to logged-in users without requiring payment
• Manage purchases, subscriptions, revenue, and content access from WordPress
• Let subscribers manage billing through the Stripe Billing Portal

A typical setup could be:

Free introduction → Paywall → $5 one-time unlock OR $10/month subscription → Stripe Checkout → reader gets access

I’m deliberately keeping PostGate focused on content monetization rather than trying to turn it into another huge membership platform.

If you need member directories, community features, complex membership profiles, courses, etc., a full membership plugin will probably be a better fit.

But if the requirement is closer to “I want to charge for this article/category/section of my WordPress site”, that’s what PostGate is designed for.

It’s free to download and there’s no recurring plugin license. The current business model is a 5% platform fee on successful transactions, in addition to Stripe’s processing fees.

You can find it on WordPress.org here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/postgate/

It’s still a relatively new plugin, so I’m especially interested in feedback from people who monetize content with WordPress. If there’s something preventing you from using it for your particular setup, I’d genuinely like to hear about it.

And if anyone wants to test a specific paywall setup and gets stuck, I’m the developer, so I’m happy to help with the configuration.

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Hi, I'll get right into it. I typically make static and simple wordpress websites (between £400 and 800 ish). I've been doing this for a while now, and am very happy with it, but I recently closed a really promising deal.

I've spoken to someone who's ready to pay the first deposit, and has given me a budget of around 4 thousand pounds. I think a fair price for something like this is somewhere in the 2-3k range. I did some digging, and think the best way to approach this is designing it as I do other websites (template based), and using the dokan plugin with the pro license to give the site the functionality it needs.

I'm putting together a proper scope of work agreement but honestly am not sure if I'm missing out on anything important. What if something creeps up and I get bitten for it, would very much appreciate some advice from those who are more experienced that myself.

Here are all the points I will cover.

- Milestone based payments - Distinct payments with distinct objectives, and clarify that paying for one milestones means approval of that work

- Explicitly mention that all changes or requirements be put in writing to avoid miscommunication

- What exactly I need from them to proceed and by when

- Scope of work, what exactly my role is and what I cannot do, but more on this below (also please let me know if I am missing anything else)

1. I need help communicating the following: Understanding wordpress limitations. I've communicated that a custom built website would cost him a lot more money, but that the best option for a new business is to save money and use something like dokan, and upgrade once it makes sense. I use elementor to build websites, so generally it is very customisable, but there will be certain bits that cannot be customised without additional charges. For example dokan's vendor dashboard seems like something that you cannot customse as freely as something like an elementor home page. The issue is that to actually show him what can and cannot be customised, I'd have to actually build the website first, which is exactly what he is paying me to do

2. I also need help communicating the limitation of liability. I'll explain that I am building a wordpress website, following all the best security practices (wordfence premium, reputable host, regular backups, 2fa for admin, regular updates and testing, reputable plugins only, etc), but that ultimately there are still things out of my control. A million things could go wrong and they could end up costing her money, but I can't help if an unexpected plugin break causes the website to go down or causes a hacker to intercept payment details, etc etc etc. Should I recommend them to get some kind of insurance to cover this? How exactly is this handled in formal contracts?

3. Lastly, I'll need to somehow explain that the monthly retainer I charge for this website could vary, and that I cannot quote what it will cost right now. As I build the site and figure out dokan for myself, and see the workflow, custom code, etc etc, I'll need to see how much headache mainteance will be and price accordingly. How is this handled?

I think WordPress is still hard to beat. AI can write code, but WordPress has a long built ecosystem already in place. You get plugins, themes, add ons, docs, step by step guides, and fixes for many typical site needs.

AI does not have to make WordPress “done.” If anything, it can speed up how people build with it. The platform and its ecosystem still handle a lot of the work behind the scenes.

WordPress agency owners: what does your development workflow look like these days?

I've been running a small agency for about two years now, and I feel like we've backed ourselves into a bit of a corner with our WordPress development workflow.

When we started, Gutenberg + FSE seemed like the obvious direction. Our setup was basically a blank FSE theme with Greenshift (and later Greenlight) blocks. The idea was that either a designer or developer could build the site directly in the editor without having to touch much code.

For smaller projects, it actually works quite well - especially when there isn't a budget for a full design phase and the design is effectively created while building the website.

But we quickly ran into two problems.

First, e-commerce.

FSE was fine for simple brochure websites, but the WooCommerce development experience was pretty painful. Greenshift had some WooCommerce functionality, but anything beyond the basics became difficult to customise.

We eventually moved to Blocksy as our base theme. It's a more traditional theme setup, but it gives us a lot of useful functionality out of the box - mega menus or quick cart are good examples - while still working nicely with the block editor.

The bigger issue, though, is the workflow between designers and developers.

Greenshift is extremely customisable, but designers can fairly quickly reach the limits of what they're comfortable doing. At that point, the task needs to be handed over to a developer.

And most of the more traditional WordPress developers we've worked with don't particularly enjoy building things in the block editor.

So you end up with this awkward handoff between designer and developer, which slows things down and creates plenty of room for miscommunication.

There's also the hiring problem. Greenshift is still relatively niche, so finding good, reliable people who already know it is difficult.

And now, with AI-assisted development becoming a bigger part of our workflow, the whole visual-builder approach feels even more awkward. AI is great at generating and modifying code, but much less useful when the source of truth is a collection of settings inside a visual editor.

So I'm curious how other small WordPress agencies handle this, especially in environments where speed matters and budgets limit the ability to create a Figma design or wireframes up front.

I am writing about Heathenry (my religion) and politics. Already a bit niche, but I also write in Dutch. I write mostly for myself and not to make a living so I'm not looking to be told to pivot my content to gain mainstream appeal, but throwing a few euro's would be worth it to me if it'd mean more people seeing and interacting with my ramblings. Is Blaze useful for that? Or will it just pop up for people that will never be interested in my stuff?

Can someone help me as I really can’t wrap my head around woocommerce.

So let’s say I have a Wordpress site already. Is woocommerce something that I integrate into it or is it that I need to build it as a woocommerce platform from start?

I can build a products page, which allows you to search or filter by price etc and then link to individual products with description and a stripe payment link. So where does woocommerce come in? Stripe keeps track of stock levels and gives me order info.

In my head woocommerce is for really big sales websites where you add products to cart etc. I really lack understanding here. Like I thought if you’re selling for example 10-30 products you could just integrate stripe. But if you have several hundred products maybe woocommerce is better?

i’ve been cutting down plugin usage on WordPress builds lately, especially for small functionality that can be handled cleanly with a few lines of code.

it's not becoz of plugins are bad. but installing a plugin for every redirect, CPT, tracking script or minor WooCommerce tweak can turn a fairly simple site into something with a lot more dependencies to maintain.

My current approach is pretty simple if the functionality is small, stable and easy to maintain, I’d rather code it. If it involves complex logic, frequent updates or something I don’t want to maintain myself, I’ll use a reputable plugin.

Interested to hear where other WordPress developers draw that line.

I am really scratching my head on this one. I clones a WP install from a subdomain to a new separate domain. Previously I had a redirect from the domain to the sub domain but after the clone and setting the config and htaccess files mydomain.com is still redirecting to sub.mydomain.com. I clear cached the and checked every existing configuration I could think of but it is still redirecting. What am I missing?

I've been using Astro for a few years, and I've worked with WordPress enough to understand why it's still everywhere.

WordPress is mature. The ecosystem is huge, developers know it, agencies know it, clients know it, and there's a plugin for almost everything. For many websites, that's more than enough, except custom-built sites could do better where custom code can solve more complex problems.

EmDash is coming from a different direction.

It's not really trying to be "the next WordPress". It's a full CMS built around Astro.

You still get the things you'd expect from a CMS: an admin panel, content types, rich text you can add block-like to your contents, media management, drafts, revisions, scheduled publishing, search, taxonomies and menus.

But the website itself remains an Astro project.

One part I find particularly interesting is the content model. Content types (Like ACF plugin) can be created and modified through the admin rather than requiring every collection to be defined in code. Each collection becomes a real SQL table with typed columns, and developers can generate TypeScript types from the live schema.

So your content is managed in EmDash, while the website is built with Astro.

For developers, EmDash also provides an API, CLI and MCP server. AI agents can work with the CMS, but isn't required to use it.

The deployment model is another difference. Self-host with Node.js uses SQLite database by default, while Cloudflare deployments can use D1, R2 and Workers. There is also support for other database and storage backends.

And there is a plugin system. On Cloudflare, plugins can run in isolated Worker sandboxes with declared capabilities. Node deployments currently use in-process plugins instead.

It's still early, and obviously it doesn't have anything close to WordPress's decades of plugins, themes, integrations and community knowledge. Yet, plugin developers are already making plans to support both CMSs, which is an encouraging sign that an ecosystem is starting to form around EmDash.

Worth reading:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-blog-uses-emdash/

Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast, also wrote about it:
https://joost.blog/emdash-cms/

Have you tried it? How's it?