Four years as the engineering desk behind a US agency's client roster

Temple Sinai is a Reform congregation in Denver: clergy and preschool, B’nei Mitzvah classes, livestreamed services, a full community calendar. Its website is looked after by a US web agency, and for more than four years that agency’s hard problems have arrived on our desk. Since June 2022 the count stands at 173 engagements and is still climbing: WordPress repairs, SSL installs, WooCommerce work, migrations, custom code, malware removal, AWS fixes. This case is one of them, told at the site where it happened.

The representative one started as a strange report: the layout broke only for certain user roles. The answer, once the site was taken apart properly, was a collision between Rank Math Pro and the hosting platform’s own WordPress toolkit routines, a fault no amount of cache-flushing would have found. The fix was mu-plugin guards around the clash and a database trigger to keep the damage from recurring. While inside, we also found two exposed database dumps sitting publicly reachable, and secured those too. The agency’s review read: “Excellent attention to detail to address the layout on certain user roles.”

That is the shape of the whole relationship. The agency keeps the client relationship and the design; we are the engineering desk behind the roster, the place difficult WordPress goes to get solved. One hundred and seventy-three times so far, across four years, at a rating a point shy of perfect.

The synagogue’s site, its look and its content belong to the congregation and its agency. What is claimed here is the work underneath, the kind that never appears in a screenshot and decides whether the screenshot exists.