ZoZ Lab is live
This site went from “domain pointing at the wrong continent” to a fully deployed WordPress stack in one working session — and it’s the template for a bigger build coming soon.
What’s underneath: WordPress and MariaDB in Docker, behind the same nginx reverse proxy that already served my n8n and dashboard subdomains, with a fresh Let’s Encrypt certificate and HTTP→HTTPS redirects. The domain’s apex DNS still pointed at the old server location from a hosting migration — one A-record fix and everything landed where it belongs.
Two deployment lessons worth recording, because they’d bite anyone:
- Docker Compose eats
$_SERVERfor breakfast. PHP variables in a compose file get interpolated to nothing unless you escape them as$$_SERVER. Symptom: a mysteriously broken wp-config. docker compose runRun it inside a script piped over SSH and it consumes the rest of your script. Every call gets</dev/nullnow.
Next on the bench: bilingual Arabic/English with proper RTL, a projects custom post type with taxonomy filtering, and working mail delivery for the contact form. Build notes as they happen.