Meeting
Local Jungle - Current
Gist
Reviewed Local Jungle's current site build with Gavin, digging into ongoing page speed frustrations with their dev team (E2M) around plugin bloat, caching, and a potential future migration to Astro to guarantee cached delivery. Chris walked Gavin through the new custom locations plugin (nav locations, schedule online, all-location-info, and footer grid blocks) built for multi-location clients, plus documentation. Set Gavin up with GitHub access to pull plugin updates going forward, and discussed Local Jungle's plan to onboard two test clients to validate their new internal process before scaling and hiring a technical project manager and intermediate developer.
Distilled from the transcript by claude-sonnet-5 · Jul 25
What came out of it
Decisions4
- Local Jungle will stay on WordPress until Astro migration is proven feasible
- Gavin will remove the Speed Optimizer plugin since it conflicts with WP Rocket
- Local Jungle will onboard two test clients (one existing, one new) to validate their build process before scaling
- Chris will give Gavin GitHub access to the Local Jungle Core plugin repository instead of just adding him as a one-off
Risks and blockers6
- Dev team (E2M) has logged around 150 hours on a site that should have been near-template-simple, driving cost and frustration
- Page speed scores are inconsistent (70s-80s) and dev team has been caught trying to fake page speed results via delayed loading
- Plugin bloat and overlapping speed plugins (WP Rocket, Security Optimizer, Speed Optimizer) are conflicting and not on Local Jungle's approved plugin list
- No one on Local Jungle's active team understands the Astro codebase, raising risk of migrating to a technology nobody can maintain
- Team is relying heavily on AI (Claude) to translate/rewrite code for Astro without deep technical understanding
- Local Jungle currently has no internal developer since the E2M relationship isn't fully solving that gap
Open questions2
- Will the Astro migration actually be technically viable, and how long will it realistically take (Craig estimates 2 months, Gavin expects longer)?
- How will the custom locations plugin handle clients with a large number of locations (e.g. 20+)?
Next steps5
- MeSend Gavin the Local Jungle Core plugin and blocks documentation via GitHub
- ClientAdd Chris to the live Local Jungle website/template to help implement the plugin correctly
- ClientGavin to get approval from Craig before rolling the new locations plugin out to the new test client
- ClientGavin to remove the redundant Speed Optimizer plugin after confirming with Craig
- VendorCraig and senior developer to continue working through page speed/plugin conflict issues before any Astro testing begins
A record of what was agreed, not a task list — nothing here was scheduled.
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