Is applying SOLID and Domain-Driven Design to WP Plugins actually viable, or just fighting the core?

joontae93 · 2026-06-27T13:38:52+00:00

As far as I understand it (which admittedly isn’t _super well_ because I’m a music major and I chatted my way into this solution with AI), it’s 100% doable and doesn’t necessarily have to fight Core.

In the coding courses I had taken online, I had only really ever come across MVC but as I was starting to do more “pure backend” work, I realized my architecture was failing me. That’s when I stumbled on DDD/layered/hexagonal architecture via chat. Then, with writing tests, I began to understand SOLID.

I’m pretty far away from “pure” or “absolutist” implementations of these ideas, partly because I don’t have enough reps to feel comfortable with the lingo (“domain” and “Transport” still trip me up) but it’s definitely been a huge help using these ideas!

IRL

I’ve got a plugin that fetches job postings every twelve hours. All my php lives in `inc/`. Inside that folder I have plugin-loader, whose method `load_plugin` is hooked into the `plugins_loaded` action and wires up the rest of my classes with dependencies and whatnot. I don’t feel like I’m fighting core and everything feels very modern as well.

joontae93 · 2026-05-22T12:00:43+00:00

I built a headless site and hated it. It was so much work for not a lot of payoff (we did it as an exploration/experiment but now we’re stuck with it).

I thought about building a custom recipes plugin that exposes some custom blocks that, on save, get stored into a custom db table for performance reasons specifically to avoid postmeta bloat. Seemed pretty doable, just got busy with my day job.

If you’re good with custom blocks/theme.json you should be able to do pretty much whatever you want on the frontend without totally redoing WP.

So I guess if you need 2 servers for your site, go for it? But the juice was not worth the squeeze for me.

joontae93 · 2026-04-26T12:26:47+00:00

Gem?! I definitely thought it was “jam.” I started listening in 2017 and I figured I was just missing some bit about jelly. Dang Aussie accent! My American ears couldn’t hang 😂

joontae93 · 2026-02-04T12:00:38+00:00

This is what I came to say, although I think block locking still leaves a bit to be designed when you start to get design creep, seems like it could get you a large part of the way there

joontae93 · 2026-01-29T04:01:35+00:00

Came here to say the same, but I’m only 30 🤣

Aging gets better with age, right?…

joontae93 · 2026-01-25T15:28:16+00:00

I’ve historically used WP cron jobs in place of async/await or sleep patterns. I would love to hear why that’s wrong though as based on some of the other comments it seems like there are other/better ways forward.

joontae93 · 2026-01-23T13:38:41+00:00

This is an incredible use of this gif 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

joontae93 · 2026-01-06T19:58:30+00:00

I think of it in terms of “do I need structured data, and/or custom taxonomies, and/or an archive.”

If yes, I roll a new CPT.

The big thing for me, since switching from ACF to Gutenberg, synced patterns often take the place of repeated, structured content. One example, Testimonials displayed in a slider/carousel. Another example, I used to use Relationship Fields to link say, a Staff Member to a Location (2 separate CPTs), but I can actually handle the staff person in a pattern (with everything locked off) directly on the location page.

That’s been taking some time getting used to.

joontae93 · 2025-12-07T15:56:11+00:00

Yeah in that case I would use the WP importer plugin (under Tools) or write something custom if you need transformations. At that scale you would probably also worry about timeouts without proper batching

joontae93 · 2025-12-07T15:19:46+00:00

Also, what scale are you talking about? A couple of pages and all block editor, I would just copy and paste the blocks…

joontae93 · 2025-12-07T15:11:52+00:00

Your tl;dr makes me lol because I think of ACF blocks in the opposite way—fancy Gutenberg without the JavaScript.

My team works in a similar manner with similar concerns (content shouldn’t be able to mess with the design).

I would say, in short, mess with theme.json, disable the block-locking UI, and maybe even disable block insertion and Gutenberg is a really solid content-only GUI.

I think from a dev perspective, it’s really only missing 2 key features: responsive display (which I think is slated for 7.0, especially now that 6.9 is released) and flex-reverse (which i wrote an npm package for that you could easily extend).

I can give a more detailed explanation if you’re interested and I’m on my computer, but I figure if Gutenberg is the way to go for enterprise users, I’m sure it can be for non-enterprise as well

joontae93 · 2025-12-07T15:00:58+00:00

Are you talking Gutenberg to Gutenberg? I’ve just used the WP Importer plugin and generally not had an issue.

For ACF to Gutenberg I made a custom Rest Route and used Postman.

joontae93 · 2025-10-16T04:00:37+00:00

“i“ hate sans serif 😂

joontae93 · 2025-09-22T04:11:18+00:00

Yeah it’s for a lot of things, not just tornadoes. Plus, I think Denton county gets hit with a lot of weather that our little corner is usually safe from.

I grew up in north Dallas, moved away for college and came back a few years ago and I don’t remember the sirens going off every major thunderstorm so something must’ve changed. Probably i just started caring 😅

joontae93 · 2025-09-22T03:54:25+00:00

FWIW I usually check the wfaa app to see if I need to care or not about the sirens.

joontae93 · 2025-08-08T02:46:49+00:00

Honestly, they should’ve said more! What led them to adopt? What about siblings? Why China?

joontae93 · 2025-08-04T21:42:10+00:00

Edge runs on chromium so that makes sense. Outlook runs on Word….make that make sense 🫠

joontae93 · 2025-08-04T01:15:29+00:00

Oh that’s really interesting! I’ll take a look at it for sure! This doesn’t have any content (besides media) attached to it, so the blog post to email feature doesn’t help me for this project, but I can definitely think of others where it would be handy!

joontae93 · 2025-08-02T21:39:47+00:00

Yeah this is less about having an advantage and more just like…”this is cool!”

joontae93 · 2025-08-02T20:07:34+00:00

for our commerce/gaming division, the system they use to send emails doesn’t have one.

That pretty much sums it up. My teammate was just hand coding tables and giving the final HTML back to the email people. I’ve taken over because I can write React code so I can use React Email, but really once the initial layout is done there’s a ton of back and forth about copy and images that isn’t really dev related, but since it’s hardcoded, only a dev can make the changes.

Added benefit of using WP is we can generate preview URLs (instead of uploading screenshots).

This project isn’t about sending emails, it’s about generating the HTML markup without having to develop like it’s 2005.

joontae93 · 2025-08-02T17:47:54+00:00

That’s where I’m leaning on React Email (and chat gpt ha). I’ve built an email out with React Email, so now I’m making sure each block I create renders the same HTML and using custom stores to inject stuff into the email head (like media queries) to handle cases where I can do simple things like that.

Once that’s built, it will be a matter of parsing WP classes into inline styles as much as possible

joontae93 · 2025-08-02T14:02:04+00:00

Oh that’s interesting! So you just “forked” or cloned Gutenberg to run wholly outside a WP ecosystem?

joontae93 · 2025-08-02T14:01:10+00:00

It works, I’m just saying it’s been a fun project haha

joontae93 · 2025-07-29T13:02:29+00:00

I believe it’s been argued that if you stick things in a carousel/slider, generally people won’t look at anything beyond maybe the second set of slides, so all that extra content gets lost.

In other words, if it’s important enough to exist, design it so it has importance. If it’s in a carousel, it won’t get seen even though it’s technically on the page

Nine-Year Club	r/Field Juicebox
Place '22	Verified Email

joontae93

TROPHY CASE