Show & tell: the little plugins powering the new digisavvy.com
No feature plugins where a hundred lines of our own code would do. A tour of the tiny single-purpose plugins we built for the rebuild — perf, typography, AI images, the lead qualifier, and one easter egg.
When we rebuilt digisavvy.com on Etch, we made a rule: no feature plugins where a hundred lines of our own code would do. The big builders and frameworks handle the visual layer — everything else on this site runs on a stack of tiny, single-purpose plugins we wrote during the rebuild. This is the show-and-tell: what each one does, why it exists, and what it replaced.
The philosophy first
Every plugin below is small enough to read in one sitting, does exactly one job, and has no settings screen unless it genuinely needs one. Most are mu-plugins — they load always, can’t be deactivated by accident, and live in the repo like any other code. When something misbehaves, we read our own 130 lines instead of spelunking through someone’s 40,000. That’s the trade: we own the maintenance, and in exchange we understand every byte that ships.
The roster
dgs-perf — the Perfmatters we didn’t install
About 130 lines of performance hygiene: strips jQuery Migrate, emoji scripts, and oEmbed host machinery; cleans the document head; throttles Heartbeat; kills pingbacks; adds preconnect hints; inlines our two tiny font stylesheets so they stop render-blocking; and keeps a minified copy of our override CSS fresh automatically. Every tweak sits behind a filter so any one of them can be switched off in one line. Mobile PageSpeed sits at 97–98 — and there’s no caching plugin in sight, because hosting and CDN already do that job.
dgs-typography — curly quotes for builder content
WordPress smartens quotes in post content, but page-builder blocks render outside that pipeline — so every apostrophe typed in the builder hit the page straight. This plugin runs the same texturizer over Etch block output, plus converts the quote entities the builder escapes, while deliberately skipping code blocks, scripts, and attributes. Site-wide typographic quotes, zero content edits.
dgs-code-highlight — backticks like it’s Markdown
Write inline code with backticks or fence a block with three of them and a language, and it renders highlighted — self-hosted Prism, a brand-matched dark theme, loaded only on pages that actually contain code. Fun bug from the build: WordPress’s texturizer converts triple backticks into curly quotes before you can parse them, so the fence filter has to run earlier in the pipeline. Now you know.
dgs-avatar — Gravatar with a fallback chain
A replacement for the avatar plugin we removed: a custom-avatar field on user profiles that wins everywhere avatars render, falling back to Gravatar (checked server-side and cached, so no broken-image flicker), falling back to initials. One filter, one profile field, done.
dgs-analytics — Fathom plus conversion events
Loads Fathom only when the site is public and the visitor is logged out — so staging and our own admin sessions never pollute the stats — and fires events on the things we actually care about: lead-form submits, booking-form submits, pricing unlocks, newsletter signups, and phone-number taps. The whole conversion dashboard, no tag manager.
dgs-lead-widget + dgs-lead-intake — the qualifier
The biggest of the bunch: the conversational lead qualifier on /start/. One question at a time, branching by answers, with an AI triage step that classifies each lead and sends back a starting estimate by email. Hot leads get an inline booking calendar on the spot; the booking webhook closes the loop when someone schedules. It replaced a contact form, a quoting back-and-forth, and a chunk of manual lead sorting.
dgs-journal-loop — the blog’s plumbing
Custom loop tokens and shortcodes that power the journal: card data (category, reading time, trimmed excerpts), the featured-post card, related posts, and the two-layer card images — every card image sits at natural proportions over a blurred low-res copy of itself. The treatment runs everywhere cards render from one helper function.
dgs-atlas-image — AI images without leaving the editor
The newest one: image generation via Atlas Cloud, from three directions — an “AI Image” block that turns into a regular image block once it generates, a panel on the native image block for filling or replacing, and a WP-CLI command for scripting. Settings include a type-ahead model picker fed by the live model catalog, aspect-ratio control, and an off-by-default optimizer that downscales and re-encodes on import. Rate-limited and capability-gated, because an image API with no guardrails is a billing surprise waiting to happen. The featured image on our scoping post? Generated with it, from the command line.
dgs-footer-weather — the easter egg
Scroll to the footer and you’ll see the current weather and local time in Pasadena. It’s pointless and we love it. Engineering note anyway: the external weather call never happens during a page request — a cron keeps a cached copy warm, so the endpoint can never slow the site down or error into a console. Even easter eggs get the reliability treatment.
What this adds up to
Seventeen active plugins on the whole site, and roughly half are ours, none over a few hundred lines. The result is a site where the plugin list reads like a table of contents instead of a junk drawer — and where PageSpeed, security posture, and editorial niceties are all things we control directly. If you’re rebuilding and your plugin list has things in it you can’t explain, that’s the signal. We can help with that, too.
