Building, repairing and simplifying a WordPress site that has been online for decades.
This is the practical WordPress side of elkin.de: migrations, small plugins, theme work and the unglamorous repairs that keep a long-lived personal site usable.
I prefer code that is understandable, local and replaceable. That usually means native WordPress features, a small amount of PHP and JavaScript, and fewer dependencies rather than another large plugin stack.
The articles below follow the site from an older CMS into WordPress and then into the current custom theme and plugins. They also document failures, because duplicate posts, stale assets and difficult migrations are often more useful than a perfect demo.
Selected articles
finishing the job
The detailed 2026 rebuild: replacing a large plugin collection with the ManagementBoy theme and MB Site Core while repairing years of legacy content.
Building a local social-media archive
How the local social-media archive was built with custom post types, resumable ZIP imports and media stored entirely on elkin.de.
Out with the old
The short design statement that began the current custom block-theme rebuild.
Moving to WordPress
The short 2013 note that marks the move from Pivot to WordPress and the beginning of the current publishing archive.
SQL Fix for Duplicate Posts from the Google+ Crossposting Plugin
A cautionary repair story about a cross-posting plugin that inserted thousands of duplicate database rows.
Skeptiker in Hamburg Homepage
A concrete example of adapting a WordPress calendar plugin for the Hamburg skeptics website.