Work / Collection · 2025
Author-marketing SaaS tools (Adazing)
A suite of Adazing web tools for self-published authors, plus a church and ministry line: AI writing assistants, book-cover mockup and promo-video generators, AI talking-character videos, a book-ad network and WordPress automation plugins. I worked across the suite as a software engineer at Adazing, and four of the plugins name me as author. The tools are procedural PHP and WordPress plugin code, with FFmpeg and PHP GD for media and OpenAI, fal.ai and ElevenLabs behind the AI features.
- employer
- collection
- client anonymized
- Client
- Author-marketing SaaS tools (Adazing)
- Type
- Collection · SaaS: author-marketing tools (employer)
- Built with
- PHP, WordPress, Gravity Forms, jQuery, FFmpeg, PHP GD, Python, OpenAI API, Stability AI, fal.ai, ElevenLabs, Wavespeed, Google Sheets API, Amazon Product Advertising API, Pexels API, AWS S3, Bunny CDN, WP Update Server
- Also uses
- Lumise, Pressbooks, Next.js
- Last active
- 2025
What it does
- AI writing engine: form inputs to prompts, multilingual output, document export, image generation and parallel API calls, customised per product.
- Model upgrades over time, from GPT-3 completions to GPT-4o-mini and fal.ai queues.
- Book-cover mockup and promo-graphic builders with server-side image compositing.
- Promo-video and motion-graphics renderer using FFmpeg overlays, with async render and polling.
- AI talking-character book videos combining image generation, text-to-speech, lip-sync and music models.
- Book-advertising network with click and view tracking and a distributable WordPress plugin.
- Scheduled posting from Google Sheets with self-hosted plugin updates.
- Automated book-blog article generator (scrape, parse, AI write).
- Church media tools: stock-photo search, AI image generation and an AI content helper.
- WordPress query optimisation mu-plugin.
- Author website tools: calculators, book-data lookup, name generators and an AI translator.
How it is built
- No shared framework. Each product is a WordPress site whose membership, checkout and page builder come from commercial plugins, with standalone PHP tool folders deployed beside it. Tools exchange data with WordPress through Gravity Forms submissions, shortcodes, cookies and a role-gating plugin. Long renders run as detached FFmpeg processes polled by the browser, with pre-rendered variants on S3. Code is reused by copying folders between products.
My part
- Wrote WordPress plugins for scheduled content automation with self-hosted updates, ad parameters, bundle-site customisation and SQL query optimisation.
Decisions
- Build tools as standalone PHP folders beside each WordPress site, integrated through forms, shortcodes and gating.
- Distribute WordPress plugins through a self-hosted update server.
- Serve pre-rendered video variants from S3 and render on demand only when needed.
Challenges
- Rendering video on ordinary PHP hosting without blocking requests.
Skills
- WordPress plugin development (cron, Gravity Forms, self-hosted updates)
- WordPress performance tuning (SQL query optimisation)
- Applied AI integration (LLM, image, voice and lip-sync APIs)
- Media processing (FFmpeg, PHP GD)
- Third-party API integration (Google Sheets, Amazon PA-API, stock-photo APIs)
