Aleksandar Andrijevic - Handling WordPress projects - begin to infinite

What is the process when starting WordPress project from scratch, from choosing theme, plugins, libraries, project organization, GIT workflow. If you follow some basic rules, your WordPress based development time will be far more less, and you will enjoy it.

Transcript

1. HANDLING
   WORDPRESS
   PROJECTS -
   BEGIN TO INFINITE
   #WCAth2017
   

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2. #WCAth2017
   Project workflow
   PITCH - Project idea and goal
   UX - Sitemap and Mockups/Wireframes
   UI - Design and client approval
   Development - Frontend, backend
   Testing - Tester, client and audience feedback
   More development - fixing bugs, changing requests, more all of
   things upper of this
   Deployment - putting it live
   Project care - solving bugs, new requests, administration
   

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3. Choosing theme
   #WCAth2017
   Pros: free, easy
   maintenance, reviewed
   by WordPress
   community
   Cons: no support, lack of
   custom functionalities,
   updates are not regular
   over time
   Pros: support, new
   updates regular,
   reviewed by professional
   developer or company
   Cons: custom functions
   not always on time,
   needs time for dev
   learning, too much code
   Pros: write what you
   need, less code using,
   more adaptive, faster
   reuse code
   Cons: usually little time
   invested in review, some
   things written from
   scratch
   

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4. #WCAth2017
   Useful plugins
   Advanced Custom Fields
   Yoast SEO
   Jetpack
   W3 Total Cache
   Regenerate thumbnails
   

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5. #WCAth2017
   Hardware infrastructure
   Local development environment: try Vagrant! You are assured that all
   other developers in team will have the same development environment.
   Staging environment: recommended to be on same hardware server
   resources as production, but of course different codebase, so client can
   see if there are any differences in speed.
   Production environment: choose managed WordPress instances by
   hosting companies, only if you are sured that they are good and you will
   not need anything beyond that. If you it is on new VPS or dedicated server,
   ask professional system administrator to set it up for you.
   

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6. #WCAth2017
   WordPress instance init
   - Installation is a breeze, either on non or virtual machine
   - Change the default wp_ tables slug. It’s never too early for security, also on
   staging/production enforce firewall if available on non-shared hosting, to
   protect from DDOS attacks.
   - HTTP password protection for staging site. You will avoid duplicate
   content and bad SEO from web crawlers, or use option in WordPress to
   disable indexing for staging
   - Protect wp-admin area, either by HTTP protection or rewrite
   

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7. #WCAth2017
   Version control
   STAGING
   MASTER PRODUCTION
   Development Staging Production
   MASTER
   MASTER PRODUCTION
   Development Staging Production
   Keep only theme and custom plugin on GIT/SVN, there is no need for
   anything else there!
   

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8. #WCAth2017
   Custom theme
   - Before you start from scratch, check out some boilerplates, Underscores starter
   theme is great! :)
   - Theme should be used only for reading and visualization of content, for
   creating/updating/deleting data use plugin
   - Only use what you need in theme. It’s much easier adding functionalities you need,
   than cleaning those you don’t
   - JS/CSS/ assets file versions for both development and production, just define it in
   wp-config.php
   - Code with define(‘WP_DEBUG’, true); , it will let you know your mistakes early, and
   make you better developer
   - Theme options class, it’s easy and if you don’t have it I will share one with you :)
   

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9. #WCAth2017
   Custom plugin
   - Before thinking about creating custom plugin, search for almost 53000 of existing
   ones, to see if there is some that match your needs
   - If you can’t find one, but there is one that with slight modifications will suit your
   needs, fork it and modify it either in files or by extending it through hooks
   - If needed written from scratch, look first at some boilerplates like
   DevinVinson/WordPress-Plugin-Boilerplate
   - Look at some other popular plugins for best practices
   - Stick closely to WordPress codex as possible
   

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10. #WCAth2017
    Theme assets
    Custom JS/CSS files should be always
    minified on production. Have separate
    versions for development and production.
    Also use concatenation for vendor JS
    libraries to build minified versions into one.
    Static images should be
    compressed. You can use
    tools like Google PageSpeed
    insights for checking it. You
    can also download optimized
    versions of images/JS/CSS.
    Always load JS/CSS assets
    with wp_register_script(),
    wp_enqueue_script(),
    wp_register_style(),
    wp_enqueue_style(),
    wp_localize_script()
    

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11. #WCAth2017
    Deployment
    - Prepare your server, or if you are not sure how, go with managed one.
    For sites that may handle bigger traffic, you may consider VPS or
    dedicated server handled by professional sys. admins
    - Install fresh copy of WordPress on new server
    - Setup version control and pull your theme and custom plugin, if needed.
    If you don’t have version control, upload them manually
    - Transfer your eventual files that you have in your upload directory
    - Migrate your development database to production, and make changes
    regarding site_url and other paths in database
    

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12. #WCAth2017
    Or use some of those
    Duplicator WP Migrate DB All-in-One WP
    Migration
    

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13. #WCAth2017
    After launch - backup and maintenance
    BACKUP!!! BACKUP!!! BACKUP!!!
    - “Keep it updated” - one of the best advices given to me about WordPress, so
    please do :)
    - Keep plugins also updated
    - Make sure that your server hardware is scalable according to your web visits and
    server usage
    - Track logs for errors, DDOS attack patterns, brute force and etc.
    - Change WordPress and other passwords regularly
    - Optimize your database for better performance
    - Keep track of non working links - 404 pages
    - Regenerate image sizes over time if new sizes are added
    

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14. #WCAth2017
    Security
    

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15. #WCAth2017
    Infinite
    ENJOY
    

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16. #WCAth2017
    Presentation link
    https://alekandrijevic.com/handling-wordpress-projects
    

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17. #WCAth2017
    Thanks!
    

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