Alex Kirk

alex.kirk.at · American English

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Own Your Apps: Alternatives You Can Run in WordPress
Jul 20, 2026 · original
The appeal of having WordPress take over more responsibilities than public websites is to reduce dependency on other (web) services that each have their own agenda. Each service starts off with a vision and the desire to fill a need. But then often economics need to be dealt with and thus services get caught up between charging their users (or showing ads) to cover the costs and the temptation to grow, thus taking more and more money from them to make it a business. I’m not here to argue about the good or bad aspects of economics. There is a lot of good in actually employing more people through a project. But coming from a sustainability angle, maybe you don’t need all aspects of each subscription but have no choice in accepting the whole bundle with its price, or giving up on the service. By having your own WordPress available as a place to run the services you really use, you can free
WordCamp Companion
Jun 3, 2026 · original
Although I won’t be attending the WordPress conference WordCamp Europe 2026 in Krakow this year because of other commitments, I built something that could be useful for attendees of it, as well as for future WordCamps. WordCamp Companion is a tool to plan your WordCamp and guide you through it, as well as for taking notes during sessions. It is built as a WordPress plugin which you can install to your own WordPress (not in the plugin directory yet so you need to download the ZIP ) or use through my.wordpress.net that I talked about in my previous posts . Use this link to start it directly in my.wordpress.net . Since it is a WordPress hosted in your browser, it is free and private. The plugin features: A live updating timeline with easy adding of sessions, Note taking for each session with export, Sharing sessions to others, AI Assistant compatibility. Scroll down to find screenshots and
Personal Software Needs a Home
May 14, 2026 · original
David Pierce’s piece in The Verge about the “personal software revolution” captures something that resonates strongly with me: AI is making it easier to create software for one’s exact needs. I think today every developer who is jumping on the AI train experiences it themselves: they can suddenly scratch many of their own software itches with a quick prompt. Of course, developers are more likely to think of software-driven solutions to real-world problems than non-developers. But as creating apps gets easier, that instinct may spread beyond developers too, as the Verge article describes. That is exciting. But I think the more interesting question is not only “who writes the code?” It is: where does this personal software live? Already before this AI revolution, developers built software using their favorite stack. That’s what they are fastest in, that’s a setup where they run their other
Why My WordPress?
Apr 14, 2026 · original
Most WordPress plugins are built to grow your audience. I’ve been going in the opposite direction for years: building tools not to increase reach, but for personal reasons: to stay connected to people I care about, to keep memories that would otherwise scatter, to own the data that documents my own life. That work has added up to something I’d call a coherent vision. And now, with my.wordpress.net , I believe I have contributed to tearing down one of the last walls that have been blocking people from joining me in this experience. The wall I have created many of the plugins I’m going to describe already some while ago. They’ve found an audience, but admittedly inside a bubble: people who already had a WordPress, or were technical enough to spin one up just to try something. But I believe the personal use of WordPress goes beyond people who already use WordPress today. It is not well know
Friends 4.0
Mar 25, 2026 · original
It has been baking for much longer than I wanted, but today I released the next major version of my Friends Plugin for WordPress . Focusing on ActivityPub The biggest change is a deviation from the original idea: Friendships between WordPresses have been removed. With ActivityPub (when the respective ActivityPub plugin is installed, too) we have a communication protocol that is supported by many more platforms than just other WordPresses that also happen to have installed the Friends plugin. Removing friendship functionality reduces a lot of complexity in the plugin that changed some fundamentals of WordPress. The friendship functionality had been deactivated for a while behind a checkbox. This means that the Friends plugin now focusses on functionality of subscribing to feeds (be it RSS, Atom or ActivityPub) and integrating outward communication via ActivityPub (direct messages, replies
WordPress Development Without a Computer
Nov 29, 2025 · original
You’re on the train, scrolling through your WordPress site on your phone, and you see an issue that you’d like to fix, for example improvement to the mobile view. Normally you’d make a (mental) note and deal with it when you’re back at your computer. But what if you could just fix it right there? With AI coding assistants that run in the browser—like Claude Code , OpenAI Codex , GitHub Copilot Workspace , or similar tools—combined with WordPress Playground for testing, you can now do WordPress plugin development without a computer. What It Looks Like AI: I’ve implemented the fix for you, committed and pushed it to Github. Use this link to Test it in WordPress Playground . This link above just leads to a generic Playground but to give you an idea of the workflow: The AI helps you fix or implement what you asked for and makes the code available in a branch. You’ll then run/view it via Play
https://alex.kirk.at/2025/11/12/2910911/
Nov 12, 2025 · original
I’ll speak about Telex and how to use Playground in your AI workflow at today’s WordPress Vienna meetup !
Adapting Tools to Your Needs with AI
Oct 14, 2025 · original
In past years, as a developer, for some features or the early stages of software, writing down the code felt like a chore. You knew what to do and you had to tediously spell it out. Of course, with AI tools like Claude Code (which I like in particular, the CLI approach appeals to me) this now is vastly better, and actually it’s quite easy to accidentally take it too far. But here, I want to talk about something different: It happens that you search for a tool and then you come across something that almost does what you want, but not quite. Before AI programming tools, you either had to be lucky to know the software stack, or it must be a really important problem to you that you would try to understand the codebase and make the modification you need. Today, I can just use Claude Code to modify any tool how I like. So instead of turning away in frustration, I just ask Claude to help me fix
Proposal: an Interactive Mode for phpcbf
Sep 29, 2025 · original
Did you ever get a little annoyed at phpcs ? Maybe you’re like me: I like the idea of PHP Code Sniffer (phpcs), but I think the user experience has room for improvement: Especially when trying to get larger amounts of PHP code to comply with the coding standards, it feels like this tool just scolds you and all you can do is to diligently work away on each and every violation that it discovers. And you might have gotten yourself into such a situation because you realized well into the project that you forgot an important ruleset , or when you’re merging codebases. Sniffs are Opinions One important thing that we tend to forget: often we are in a position where we can actually make the decisions which rules to follow and which not. A ruleset prepared by someone else might contain things we disagree with. Thus phpcs contains the ability to exclude sniffs via its phpcs.xml configuration file,
npm install playground-step-library
Sep 5, 2025 · original
I have updated my Playground Step Library ( which I had written about before )–the tool that allows you to use more advanced steps in WordPress Playground –so that it can now also be used programmatically: It is now an npm package: playground-step-library . Behind the scenes this actually dominoed into migrating it to TypeScript and restructuring the code so that it now both powers the Web UI and the npm package. Having those custom steps available now makes even more sense that the Playground CLI is production ready and you can use it for things like testing your WordPress plugin with Playwright, see this presentation Building Automated Tests with WordPress Playground from WordCamp Europe 2025 by my colleague Berislav “Bero” Grigicak . In this example you can see a blueprint JSON that contains steps setSiteName and addPage that don’t exist in the library of steps of Playground . At the

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