This site is a chronicle. Every post on it, starting with this one, documents what is happening with Zorderz — an open-source business backend for WordPress — as it happens. New releases will be announced here, decisions will be explained here, and mistakes will be owned here. If you are reading this on the homepage, you are looking at the whole format already: newest news at the top, click in for the details.
What Zorderz is
Zorderz turns a WordPress install into the central utility point for a small business. The idea is simple to say and surprisingly rare in practice: your business already uses good tools — invoicing software, a CRM, a calendar, maybe an AI assistant — but they don’t live in one place, and none of them know about each other. Zorderz is the hub that connects them, wrapped in an app your team actually opens: a login at something like app.yourcompany.com, on your own domain, on your own hosting, with your own data.
Out of the box it is deliberately blank. Products, services, employees, routes, customers — whatever the things in your business are called, you name them, and the system gives them fields, categories, and rules. The rules part matters: real businesses run on conditional logic like “this employee can’t do this action during these hours unless an admin says so.” Zorderz treats that kind of per-business rule as a first-class feature, not a customization hack.
For AI, Zorderz is bring-your-own-intelligence. The first supported connection is the Poe API, which gives one key access to many models — and because API traffic is business-to-business, it comes with a different privacy posture than pasting your customer list into a consumer chatbot. More connections will follow.
Where it comes from
Zorderz is not a concept sketch. It is the generalization of a real internal platform I built for one company: a WordPress theme and more than fifteen plugins that handle estimates, invoicing sync, CRM sync, scheduling, job handoffs, internal messaging, satisfaction surveys, photo workflows, and an AI assistant that answers questions about the business — all running in production, hardened by real employees using it every day.
Here’s the bet behind open-sourcing it: that platform is hyper-specialized to one company, but the shapes inside it are universal. Every commercial business sells products or services. Every business has employees. Every business has rules about who may do what, and when. Zorderz is the same machinery with the specifics lifted out, so any business can pour its own names in.
One honest note about who this is for: I don’t expect most business owners to install Zorderz themselves — it assumes someone comfortable running a WordPress site. I think Zorderz gets installed and configured by WordPress developers on behalf of business owners, and I think that’s a genuinely new kind of work for those developers. This site will eventually carry the how-tos to support them.
How this site was built (full disclosure)
Transparency is a core value of this project, so here is exactly how this website came to exist. I talked into a voice memo for seventeen and a half minutes, describing what Zorderz is and what its home on the web should be. I handed the transcript to Claude — Anthropic’s Fable model — and asked it to run with the idea until a finished WordPress theme came out the other end.
It built the theme you are looking at: a minimal chronicle layout with automatic light and dark modes, a built-in focus-keyword SEO checker inspired by the way Rank Math works, per-page index/noindex controls, global “external links get nofollow and a new tab” best-practice defaults, and a sidebar any page can switch on when it needs one. It spun up a test WordPress install, verified everything worked, took the screenshots, and drafted this post. It even logged into the hosting, the registrar, and the DNS provider to wire up the domain you are reading this on. I reviewed it, edited it, and published it.
Every future release will be documented the same way: what changed, how it was made, and why. When the day comes that an AI can set up an entire Zorderz install from a single instruction, the groundwork for that will have been laid in posts like this one.
What’s next
The goal on the calendar: the first fully open-source listing of Zorderz on August 1, 2026. When the repository is public, a GitHub link will appear at the top of this site, along with a download. Until then, this chronicle — and the About page — are the project. Check back, or grab the RSS feed in the footer.
— Carleton