💼 Work Samples

While much of my work over the past 10 years lives in private repositories, I was fortunate that my most recent team worked primarily in the open. Below are a few public contributions I made during that time.

Product Development

WooCommerce Blocks

When I first joined the WooCommerce store editing team, we worked on the WooCommerce Blocks repository. This was set up as a feature plugin that was released into WooCommerce Core – similar to how Gutenberg is to WordPress Core.

I joined the team as an individual contributor and shortly after took over as the team lead, where I continued to contribute to the codebase and also led the team from an engineering management standpoint (working with cross-function product management and engineering directors to roadmap and scope out the team’s priorities).

Below are some highlights that contain a mix of code contributions and technical communication/guidance.

PR Highlights

WooCommece Core

At the start of 2024, the WooCommerce Blocks repository was archived, and all related development was consolidated into the WooCommerce Core monorepo.

PR Highlights

WordPress.com Landing Pages

During my time on the engineering team (MarTech) under WordPress.com marketing division, one of our primary responsibilities was the management of the logged-out WordPress.com homepage, along with the building and maintenance of the marketing landing pages.

The framework that drove these landing pages had a lot of layers and legacy code. Shortly after I joined the team, I proposed an idea to migrate our legacy framework to use the block editor, which was fairly new at the time. The reasoning behind this was that, up to that point, all of the landing pages required the engineering team to build from start to finish. By utilizing the new block-based editor in our framework, we could allow our designers and other members of the marketing team to build out these landing pages more rapidly within the constraints of our pre-composed blocks and patterns. With the new framework in place, instead of the engineering team receiving requests to build landing pages, we would instead receive requests for features for the block framework.

This project, internally named “Landpack”, was very well received and significantly reduced the amount of time it took to launch a new marketing landing page. I led the project from conception to initial launch and this framework is still in place today. Unfortunately, the code is not available publicly but below are a few links to the front end of some of the landing pages that are driven by this block-based framework:

Website Development

Syngap Research Fund

I currently volunteer as the technical lead for the nonprofit Syngap Research Fund, overseeing development and maintenance of their site, curesyngap1.org. When I joined, the site was running on Webflow. While Webflow offers a strong visual editing experience, it presented limitations around user roles and content management—particularly the inability to support multiple editors without additional per-user costs. To better support the organization’s needs, I migrated the site to WordPress, enabling custom roles, granular permissions, and a more scalable, intuitive content workflow.

Below are links to the live site and the code repositories for the custom theme, plugin, and migration scripts used during the rebuild.

Website frontend: https://curesyngap1.org

Theme

After migrating the data from Webflow, I designed and developed a new WordPress theme for the organization. At that time, full site editing was not quite production-ready, so I built it as a classic theme.

Additional technologies used:

  • Tailwind CSS to design and build the styles. This helped expedite the design process a good bit. That said, I can see Tailwind being better in more of a component context.
  • Alpine.js for front-end interactivity. It’s worth noting that WordPress’s Interactivity API was influenced to some degree by Alpine. If I were to decide on making this a block theme sometime in the future, I would aim to mirror the work I did in Alpine.js on the WordPress Interactivity API.

Code repository: https://github.com/syngapresearchfund/srf

Focus areas: Design, WordPress/PHP, JavaScript/Alpine.js, CSS/Tailwind

Plugin

Along with the theme, I developed a plugin to manage the site’s custom post types and related data. It’s a straightforward setup, designed to make adding new post types easy while keeping content management cleanly separated from the theme itself.

Code repository: https://github.com/syngapresearchfund/srf-forge

Focus areas: WordPress/PHP

Migration scripts

Migrating the data from Webflow to the new WordPress site posed some challenges, as Webflow’s export separated CMS content from static content. To streamline the process, I used Webflow’s API to retrieve all data and developed custom scripts to map and import the different content types into WordPress.

Code repository: https://github.com/syngapresearchfund/srf-import-scripts

Focus areas: WordPress/PHP

WooCommerce Swag Store

As engineering lead, I collaborated with the WooCommerce Design and Marketing teams to develop the Woo Swag Store demo websites that showcased various WooCommerce features at the three flagship WordCamp events in 2024.

This involved custom block theme development and the development of a custom plugin to customize the cart + checkout experience and implement tracking for a marketing campaign.

Website frontend:

Focus areas: WordPress/Gutenberg/Full Site Editing (CSS, JavaScript), Custom WordPress Plugin development (PHP)

DWR.IO (personal blog – archived)

This is a previous version of my personal dev blog and digital notebook. I designed and built it as a static site using Gatsby.js.

Application frontend: https://dwr.netlify.app/

Code repository: https://github.com/danielwrobert/dwr.io

Focus areas: Design, CSS / custom component architecture, JavaScript / React, Automated testing.

DWR.IO (personal blog – current)

After running my site on Gatsby for a while, I decided to move it back to WordPress for its out-of-the-box flexibility and features. I wanted to maintain my existing design, so I used the opportunity to experiment with building a custom Block Theme.

Application frontend: https://dwr.io/

Code repository: https://github.com/danielwrobert/demeter

Focus areas: Design, WordPress/Gutenberg/Full Site Editing

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