Design systems · Content platforms
WordPress
Five years running a WordPress platform for thousands of people at Orange. Then a quiet skill, until agentic tools started making it useful again.
For five years I ran the WordPress platform behind Orange's global design community — up to five thousand people across the company coming for guidance on how to build for Orange's digital products. I didn't expect to pick that skill back up. Agentic tools are changing that.
Running a design community, not a template site
I wasn't writing the PHP myself. I directed a small development team in Cairo, two or three people, who handled the updates and the security. My job, and my team's, was keeping the platform honest to the same guidelines it was publishing. The theme was built on Orange Boosted, Orange's own open-source framework, so the platform looked like the standard it was teaching.
Knowing when a tool has done its job
WordPress served us well for years, while the design system was still contained enough for one platform to hold it. As it grew into something more global and more demanding, I led the move onto Zeroheight, a platform built specifically for design systems. WordPress didn't fail. The system outgrew what a general-purpose CMS could do well, and I made the call before it became a problem.
Zeroheight →Why I'm picking it back up now
Most of what I build today is clean Next.js and Tailwind. That works well when I stay the one running the site. It stops working the moment a client needs to edit their own content after I hand it over. That's when you need a real content management system, and there's no shortage of businesses already running WordPress. I'm choosing it because it's everywhere already, and because of what's happening to it right now.
The resurrection
Agentic tools are starting to do for WordPress what they already do for Shopify: let an agent like Claude Code or Codex operate the platform directly, instead of a person clicking through an admin panel. It's not there yet. WordPress is still behind Shopify on this. But the last few months have moved fast, and I expect that gap to keep closing. The skill I built running Orange's platform by hand, with a small human team, is turning out to be exactly the skill agentic WordPress needs next. It sat still for a while. It didn't go away.
There's no live OGANIKO build on WordPress yet. Winston is next, about to kick off, and this page gets a real example the day it ships. Until then, this is the honest state of it: real experience running WordPress at scale, and a genuine bet that agentic tools are about to make that experience valuable again.