Themes & plugins Practical
The form works, so why does no mail arrive?
The form is rarely the problem. The mail is being blocked at sending or filed as spam — and once you understand the structure, this is a solvable…
Technote
WordPress know-how, from real work Technotes worth picking
12 articles· Themes & plugins · Founders
Themes & plugins Intro
Free or paid theme: what the money actually buys
What a paid theme actually buys is a year of updates and support — which is why the decision comes back around every twelve months.
Themes & plugins Practical
Plugin count is a budget, not a feature list
The plugin ecosystem is WordPress's greatest strength. But each one you enable adds an item to check every month, and that budget is finite.
Themes & plugins Practical
Taking payment in Korea: transfer, card gateway, or overseas
These are not substitutes for each other; they are separate paths with different requirements. Overseas payment in particular brings a currency problem you should not solve by converting.
Themes & plugins Practical
The three minutes before you press install
A plugin runs inside your site with the same privileges you have. So the criterion is not the feature but the trust — and trust is checkable before…
Themes & plugins Practical
Colours and fonts are not a per-page decision
Choosing a colour each time you build a page produces ten sites inside one. Putting them in one global place removes the problem entirely.
Themes & plugins Intro
You only need about five plugins to start
A plugin is not one feature — it is one maintenance liability. Install twenty at the start and you will never work out which one causes a problem.
Themes & plugins Practical
When you genuinely need a shop system
WooCommerce is a fine piece of software. It is also a great deal of machinery to maintain for a single one-off product. Start by naming what it actually…
Themes & plugins Intro
How far the block editor gets you, and where it stops
Knowing what the built-in editor already does saves money before you buy a builder — and the signal that you need one arrives later than you think.
Themes & plugins Intro
What free covers, and what you should pay for
Compare feature tables and the paid tier always wins. The founder's criterion is not features but the weight of your data — what you lose if the tool…
Themes & plugins Intro
Do not choose a theme by how it looks
Every theme demo looks good. What decides whether it still works a year from now is maintenance history and speed — both checkable before you buy.
Themes & plugins Intro
Payment, booking or enquiry: which conversion is yours?
It looks like a feature choice, but it decides the shape of your business. Pick the wrong one and the tool starts dictating your pricing and your day.
Cited
Technotes worth reading next
Topics outside WordPress are collected on Dongji Communication Tech Insights, run by the same team. The summaries below are quoted from the originals; the titles link to them.
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Working with AI
Writing a CLAUDE.md — teaching an AI coding assistant your project
AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor and Copilot do better work the more precisely they know your project. Here is a structure and a set of principles that hold up.
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Working with AI
Prompting an AI for UI design — drafting with Claude and GPT
Asking an AI to "make a nice button" gets you a disappointing button. Structured prompts that carry constraints, references and a defined role get you the design you meant.
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Themes & plugins
SCSS from the ground up — variables through module structure
The core syntax of SCSS (Sass) and what it solves that plain CSS cannot: variables, nesting, mixins, @use and module structure — organised around patterns you can use immediately.
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Themes & plugins
Design tokens and theme colour systems — brand identity in SCSS variables
How to turn a colour palette from a pile of hex codes into a system that means something — semantic token structure and SCSS variable patterns, from a real project.
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Performance optimization
Designing a responsive typography system — the science of readability
Hard-coded pixel font sizes are over. Type scales, fluid sizing with clamp(), Korean webfont optimisation and line-height ratios — building typography that reads well on any screen.
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Development workflow
From Figma to SCSS — a designer-developer handoff guide
Minimising what gets lost between a Figma file and the code: extracting tokens, naming components, keeping the spacing system in sync — the whole workflow, step by step.