Workflow for managing ongoing projects

James Bundey@jamesbundey

Melbourne WordPress Developer Meetup November ‘15

The Rationale1. Move away from a whole host of bad practises.2. Streamline the management & development

process.3. Eliminate issues.4. Allow for easy collaboration.5. Have something that was version controlled.

The Thought Process1. Set-up site for local development.2. Develop/modify theme and store changes with

version control.• Use task runners, preprocessors etc.• Manage plugins, libraries and dependencies

3. Automatically deploy updates to staging server for review.

4. Test & debug in a live environment.5. Easily deploy to production.

Local SetupThe Server• Built using Vagrant, VirtualBox & Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV)

to set up a WordPress specific install.The Site• Fresh install created using Variable VVV site wizard plugin. (

https://github.com/bradp/vv)• VVV installation clones ‘wp-content’ git repo that contains theme

framework and common plugins.• Theme folder contains base grunt/gulp and bower package files

for common dependencies, and core file/sass structure and function files.

• Once installed, .git is removed from ‘wp-content' as we want to add the theme folder as a new repo.

• If needed the production DB is pulled using WP Migrate DB Pro.

Developing locallyThe Theme• The theme is stored and versioned controlled via a git repo. All

commits are documented and pushed to a Bitbucket company account.

• All collaborators have access and update as required.The Deployment• Beanstalk (http://beanstalkapp.com) is used to deploy the all

theme updates.• To do this a repository is created in beanstalk and added as a

remote to the existing git repository.• Set-up an automatic ‘Deployment’ in beanstalk to the staging

server.• Once final changes have been committed we simply push to the

bitbucket repo and then push to beanstalk.

Live environmentStaging• We made the decision to use a premium WordPress host -

https://pressidium.com• Primary reason was the ability to easily clone and deploy from

production to staging and back.• The staging site theme is automatically updated whenever changes

are committed to git and push to beanstalk.• If required Migrate DB pro is again used to push any database

changes to staging server.• If there are significant changes to the site we create a new DB

install and update the wp-config file.Production• Never touch it apart from deploying staging to production when

approved.

Working with limitationsNo staging server.

• Set-up an automatic deployment to “theme name_staging”.• Use Theme Test Drive Plugin.• Review and test on live server.• From beanstalk manually deploy to “theme name_prod”.

No money• Don’t want to pay for Beanstalk.

• Grunt SFTP deploy(https://github.com/thrashr888/grunt-sftp-deploy)

• Gulp-sftp (https://www.npmjs.com/package/gulp-sftp)• Private repositories on Bitbucket are free.• Take a look at wordmove - https://github.com/welaika/wordmove

Questions?

Connect with me

@jamesbundey

www.linkedin.com/in/jamesbundey