Why I Built Loopress
Iâm a frontend developer whoâs spent the last few years working in environments where everything is versioned, deployments are automated, and âit works on my machineâ isnât an acceptable answer.
One of the jobs that shaped how I think about this was Bedrock Streaming, a streaming platform where every developer owned their infrastructure, frontend included, and the tool we used was Terraform. I remember something clicking when I started using it: your infra is just a file, which means it gets versioned, reviewed, and rolled back like any other piece of code. That idea stuck with me well past that job.
A site for my sister
Section titled âA site for my sisterâMy sister runs an online French tutoring business (nativefrenchteacher.com). Sheâs not technical, and she needed to manage her own content without calling me every time. WordPress made sense.
And honestly, it worked great for her. Whatever I needed (bookings, SEO, forms, caching) there was a plugin. The ecosystem is massive.
Building with it as a developer was another thing entirely.
I used the Code Snippets plugin constantly. And every time I touched a snippet, the same thought: if something breaks, I have no history. No diff. Just hope it doesnât break.
The real moment was when I needed to manipulate PDFs and wanted to pull in a Packagist package. So I SSHâd into the server, installed Composer manually, ran the install, crossed my fingers. It worked. But it felt wrong. This is a solved problem everywhere else.
The gap
Section titled âThe gapâI came from a world where code lives in Git and environments are reproducible. WordPress assumes you click things in the admin, upload files via FTP, and remember what you changed. Production is always slightly different from local.
Thatâs not a knock on WordPress. Itâs built for a different audience. But the developer building on top of it is left to figure things out alone.
What I built
Section titled âWhat I builtâI started building Loopress: a CLI to version-control code snippets in Git and sync them to any WordPress instance, and a plugin that brings Composer dependency management into the admin panel, no SSH needed.
The goal was to bring the same idea I took away from Terraform into WordPress: your snippets, your dependencies, your configuration, all of it living in a repo, reviewable, deployable, not scattered across admin panels and SSH sessions youâll never remember.
Still building. If any of this sounds familiar, I built it for you.