What I learned
A membership site lives or dies on its gating model. Get the auth + plan-tier shape right and everything downstream — content surfaces, billing, search, navigation — falls into place. Get it wrong and you spend the rest of the project working around it.
I also re-learned how productive a modern WordPress stack actually is when you stop fighting it. Sage 11 + Acorn + Blade + Tailwind v4 gives you a Laravel-shaped developer experience inside WordPress, with a component library that makes content editors and developers happy at the same time.
What I did
- Closed the iscpo.org engagement as lead consultant.
- Co-architected a WordPress membership platform with a config-driven component library and a custom three-tier Memberful authentication model gating plan-based access.
- Designed and developed end-to-end — brand application, design system, Blade component architecture.
- Implemented on Sage 11 + Acorn 5 + Blade + Tailwind v4 + Alpine.js, with Memberful for auth and billing.
What I shipped
A live membership platform with tier-gated access, a fully themed brand application, and a reusable Blade component library that the client’s editors can extend on their own. Deployed and in production.