Work in Progress

A live showcase of public repositories from @newlocalmedia and @dknauss, pulled directly from GitHub.

15 Curated repositories shown on this page.
66 Combined stars across the curated set.
05-08-26 01:34 Last GitHub snapshot in your local time.
Keel banner — a sailboat and keel mark beside the Keel wordmark and the tagline “Sensible defaults for steady sites.” on a dark navy field.
Featured Repo
What if a fresh WordPress install just started out sensible?

Keel

Sane, individually-toggleable WordPress defaults across security, updates, privacy, UX, and performance — 37 switches in one place, nothing hidden and nothing all-or-nothing.

Most “disable it” plugins close the front door and leave a side one open. Measured against nine of the most-installed alternatives on wordpress.org — every cell a live HTTP or PHP probe rather than a readme claim — Keel is the only one in the field where comments are off holds below the presentation layer: get_comments() still returns approved comments on the others, and zero on Keel.

AI-Assisted Docs and Related Work

Agentic tools and processes to help humans write, review, and maintain technical documentation. Don't sacrifice — increase — your rigor, accuracy, and editorial judgment.

WordPress Block Themes

Block themes built on core blocks and plain HTML, with no build step standing between you and the markup.

Dirtbag theme card — the Dirtbag wordmark, a line-drawn pickup truck, and the tagline “Nothing but good bones and road grit.” over a list reading no build step, no theme JavaScript, web-safe fonts, style variations, core blocks first.

Dirtbag

Dirtbag is for people who want to learn WordPress theme design and front-end development by stripping down to fundamentals and building up from there. It favours plain HTML markup, as little CSS and JS as possible, core WordPress blocks, the fonts everyone already has, visible feeds, and old open-web habits over front-end machinery.

Out of the box it is a plain, unstyled, brutalist foundation with a 1990s view-source feel, packaged with Web 1.0-inspired page templates, block patterns, and six global styles: Amber CRT, Blueprint (or BSOD), Hi-vis (No-Name), Minimalist, Newspaper, and Terminal. Unlike the default no-style style, those variations open the door to the full powers of the site editor if you want to go there.

4Last updated

WordPress Block Plugins

Block editor plugins that bring specialized content types and structured data to WordPress.

Experiments

More Projects!

Other things I've been working on.

Concluded

A finished experiment in making WordPress ask for your password again before something dangerous happens. It did not work, and the seven ways around it are written up rather than patched, because the write-up is the point. Archived read-only — not for installation.

42Last updated

GitHub Accounts

Browse the full public repository lists behind this curated selection.