The brief
Pacific Zen Institute is a non-profit teaching organization with a deep audio library and a member-supported model. I was referred in by Matt Kopola at Site District in 2018, when their original theme developer had moved on and the WordPress site had outgrown the people who could maintain it. The member paywall — the actual revenue mechanism — was a broken third-party plugin.
The goal was straightforward, and stayed the goal across every phase since: liberate the team from lock-in, leverage the content and infrastructure that already worked, and put more power into the hands of the people running the place every day. Fewer dependencies on me. Fewer dependencies on any single developer. More capacity to move without engineering involvement.
What I built, in phases
Phase 1 — paywall rescue. Their member paywall was a broken third-party plugin holding the membership funnel hostage. I ripped it out and rebuilt the logic directly in the theme — owned, debuggable, extendable.
Phase 2 — payments and commerce, owned end-to-end. Payment-processor issues escalated into a deeper rebuild. WooCommerce + Stripe became the new commerce spine, which unlocked recurring memberships, clean integrations with their CRM and email tools (Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign), and a QuickBooks sync that took the accounting reconciliation off their plates.
Phase 3 — series-based learning. Exclusive classes and series content gated behind the paywall, presented as cohesive learning paths instead of a flat library.
Phase 4 — Gutenberg refactor. I migrated the editorial flow away from template-driven layouts into custom Gutenberg blocks, patterns, and styles. Admins gained granular control over composition while brand adherence held — no more “we need the developer to add a section.”
Phase 5 — search. The most recent project: advanced indexing and search across the library archive, with grid and card views so the content itself does the wayfinding.
What’s notable about it now
Eight years in, Pacific Zen has come back for five major phases of work and hasn’t gone anywhere else. The arc tells the real story: the brief never changed. Every phase was a step further from “we need a developer for that” toward “we have what we need to move.” That’s what long engagements look like when the goal is liberation, not lock-in.