WooAccount
WooCommerce Customer Commerce Platform
The platform
The problem
What was built
Stack
Engineering profile
Saif Al-Islam Tirab
Founder & Full-Stack Engineer
SUDAN · 2010 →
I am a full-stack web engineer based in Libya, building for the web since 2010. My work sits at the intersection of backend systems and product delivery: designing the architecture, writing the server and client code, wiring the infrastructure underneath it, and staying accountable for how the system behaves in production long after launch.
Most of that work has been on real, operating software — e-commerce platforms, business tools, WordPress and WooCommerce builds, custom PHP applications, APIs and integrations — where the constraints are never theoretical: live traffic, real payments, legacy code, and owners who need things fixed without breaking something else. That environment shaped how I engineer. Scope is explicit. Architecture is decided before complexity is added. Changes ship in controlled, reviewable releases — and what is deployed is monitored, maintained and documented.
Backend.ly is the distillation of that approach. It is the platform I designed and built to run the complete lifecycle of web development work: the first description of a problem, through scoping and fixed-price proposals, tasks and releases, deployments and incident timelines, to invoicing, licensing and long-term maintenance. The discipline it enforces — structured requests, client-approved releases, honest status — is the same discipline I bring to every system I work on.
I work across the stack deliberately, because products rarely fail at a single layer. A slow page can be a missing index, a misconfigured server, or a data model fighting the design. Owning the full path — backend services, databases, APIs, React and Next.js frontends, Linux infrastructure — means fewer handoffs between people, faster diagnosis, and solutions that hold.
Grouped by engineering domain — the toolset changes with the problem, the discipline does not.
Backend
Frontend
CMS / Commerce
Infrastructure
Product Engineering
Now shipping
The production stack behind backend.ly — chosen, operated and maintained end to end.
A progression in phases — from first lines of code to owning a platform in production.
2010
Started exploring web technologies and software development — self-directed, building and taking systems apart to understand how the web actually works.
Development
Progression into web development: backend systems, databases and production websites — moving from experiments to software that real people depend on.
Product Engineering
Building custom systems, integrations, plugins and business platforms — owning architecture and delivery end to end, not just writing code to a spec.
Backend.ly
Building and operating a platform for developing, deploying and maintaining web products — the complete lifecycle of client work in one system, in production.
Backendly
Digital engineering platform
The platform
The problem
What was built
Stack
Role
Outcome
07 PARTS · EXPAND EACH STAGE
Backendly is built and operated by a single engineer based in Libya, serving clients who need serious web work without agency overhead. The platform is not a showcase piece — it is the production system the business itself runs on: every request, proposal, invoice, release and deployment on this site flows through it.
Web development work usually lives in scattered, unauditable channels — chat threads, email chains, verbal promises. Scope drifts, payments get messy, incidents have no timeline, and the client has no honest view of progress. Coordination eats the engineering time, and trust erodes on both sides.
One Next.js application with TypeScript end to end — server-rendered public pages and client workspace alike. Prisma models the domain (roughly 37 entities: users, projects, requests, proposals, tasks, releases, deployments, incidents, invoices, ledger entries, products, licenses, posts, subscribers, notifications, audit activity) over SQLite on a Linux VPS behind nginx. Site content and platform settings are admin-controlled through a Setting-driven CMS, so the site evolves without redeploys. Secrets live only in the server environment — never in the database or the client bundle.
Authentication combines credentials, one-time codes and social sign-in (Google live, GitHub ready) with email verification; role-based access separates the admin console from client workspaces. The commerce engine covers fixed-price proposals, invoices, milestone funding, a double-entry-style ledger, and a digital market with instant license-key issuance. Operations get incident timelines, deployment records, an activity audit log, rate limiting and bot-resistant public forms, plus an email system with a template registry, event matrix, delivery log and signed unsubscribe links. An automated regression suite — 360+ checks across auth, payments, requests, operations and email — runs against every release.
Operating as both the builder and the operator means every shortcut is eventually paid for personally. The database evolved repeatedly while production traffic was live — schema changes executed as backed-up, step-by-step migrations. OAuth callbacks had to survive a reverse-proxy topology that rewrites request origins. Email had to earn deliverability on a young domain — proper provider wiring and template discipline rather than a bulk sender.
Strong conventions over configuration sprawl: one codebase, one design system, one source of truth per concern — settings in the database, secrets in the environment, uploads on disk with metadata in rows. Admin controls replace redeploys for content and branding. Honest infrastructure: a public health endpoint and status page reporting real checks, never hardcoded green.
The platform runs the business it was built for — requests, funding, builds, reviews, deployments and maintenance all happen inside it, live at backend.ly. It ships with truthful status reporting, a compliant newsletter loop, a documentation center for clients, and a regression suite standing guard over the next change.
WooAccount
WooCommerce Customer Commerce Platform
The platform
The problem
What was built
Stack
01
Understand the actual business problem before writing code.
02
Design the system before adding complexity.
03
Implement reliable, maintainable software.
04
Test the system against real usage.
05
Move the product safely into production.
06
Maintain and improve it as requirements change.
The engineering publication behind the work — frameworks, decisions and field notes, written the way the systems were built. Every article is authored here.
CLIENT ENGAGEMENTS RUN THROUGH THE SAME WORKSPACE — AND REMAIN CONFIDENTIAL.
Role
Outcome
07 PARTS · EXPAND EACH STAGE
WooAccount was built as a standalone product to solve the limitations of the default WooCommerce customer account experience. The premise: WooCommerce gives every customer an account page — WooAccount gives them a customer portal. It ships and licenses as its own commercial product, yet never fights WooCommerce for authority over store data.
The native account experience spreads important customer actions across separate screens and leaves too much of the experience to themes and template overrides. Orders, downloads, addresses, payments and support live on different pages, pending payments dead-end, and every theme update risks the flow — the customer journey fragments exactly where trust matters most.
A standalone WooCommerce account application layer that communicates through the public WooCommerce APIs and remains HPOS-aware — no direct HPOS table queries, ever. WooCommerce stays the source of truth for commerce data and business rules, while WooAccount owns the application frame, the routing and the interaction model through a REST API architecture with its own lightweight data layer.
Built across WordPress, WooCommerce and PHP on the server, with a React-based product UI on the client. The build spans the plugin architecture, backend APIs, authentication and account security, the customer-facing application UI, document generation for print-ready invoices, notifications and support workflows — plus the licensing infrastructure: signed licenses, activation management and a 14-day grace period.
One portal owns every surface a customer touches: dashboard, orders with real store actions, invoices, wallet and rewards ledgers, coupons, support tickets, downloads, notifications, addresses and account controls — dense, fast, RTL and LTR, with an admin control center behind it. It behaves like a product, not a settings page.
Ownership checks on every customer resource, WooCommerce permissions and capabilities respected throughout, secure document routes and controlled downloads. Licensing is signed and activations are managed, with a 14-day grace period so legitimate stores keep operating while licensing issues are resolved — and the portal reads live store data directly: no copy, no sync, nothing to drift.
A production-ready commercial WooCommerce product — WordPress 6.7+, WooCommerce 9.0–11.x, PHP 8.1+, HPOS-native — that turns the default account area into a complete customer-facing commerce layer while leaving WooCommerce responsible for commerce data and business rules. Live at wooaccount.com, with a public demo running a real store.
POWERED DIRECTLY BY WOOCOMMERCE — NO DATA COPY, NO SYNC.