Welcome to the fresh new site! After years of relying on third-party software, I’ve now officially swapped standard WordPress  and Coppermine for my own custom-built platforms. I built these entirely from scratch out of personal need, but kept fellow fansite creators and hobbyists in mind every step of the way.

First up is Lumora Press - what you are reading this on right now! It's a lightweight, self-hosted PHP blogging platform inspired by the elegance and simplicity of classic WordPress (think 2012–2015 era!). It’s all about writing, publishing, and customizing with classic themes, widgets, and plugins. No block editors, no page builders, no AI bloat - just simple, fast blogging. Since it’s an independent codebase built from scratch (not a fork), it runs super fast and stably on modern PHP and basic shared hosting.

On top of that classic WordPress goodness, I also added a few features to Lumora Press Core that I've been wishing WordPress had without needing a million plugins: virtual folders in the Media Manager (so you can finally organize hundreds of icons, wallpapers, and photos by subject with ease!), direct file importing from FTP and Downloads.

Then there’s Lumora Gallery, a modern dedicated gallery inspired by Coppermine Photo Gallery. It’s built to handle big visual collections, fan archives, and tons of photos without breaking a sweat. It's been running the screencaps galleries since June so you've probably been using it already.

Building both of these from the ground up gives me total freedom from modern web bloat and brings back the classic workflow that makes site-making fun again ❤️

I’ve also put together a few other handy scripts—feel free to check them out over at https://coding.unloved-heart.net!