Architecting the Madness: WordPress as a Modern Development Framework and Business

Great presentation. Fast. Inspiring. A lot of stuff to follow up on. Informative.

Didn't hit a few of the points that are some of our most significant challenges with WordPress: migrating databases between environments, and keeping uploads folders in-sync on multiple load-balanced servers. Some of the enthusiasm was a bit marketing-y. But did point to a lot of great tools we'll be evaluating.

Wow, I really enjoyed aspects of this talk. I do like the idea of using WP as a dependency. I think the biggest thing was it seemed to apply mostly to either large WP sites or large(r) companies developing many WP sites. It seemed like all of the details would take awhile to initially set up and would be unneeded overhead for many of the small(er) websites running WP.

However, clearly the ideas in it were some great food for thought and I would love to consider a different approach for developing a WP site.

The presentation was excellent with good slides and speaking. If your company does much WP, I would recommend listening and considering the ideas presented.

Thank you to everyone that attended the session. I was trying a lightning talk format, so I hope everyone was able to glean something from the talk. I did end up sitting down with a few of the attendees for a couple of hours afterwards showing them some of the technologies first hand. If you would like some personal mentorship or some assistance, I implore you to reach out to me.

@Josh: Thanks a million for the feedback! Unfortunately due to time, we just weren't able to hit all of the challenges WP developers face. As a result, I chose topics that I feel hadn't been covered in previous talks or articles.

Re: db migration, I recommend looking at either https://github.com/jplew/SyncDB or https://github.com/wp-sync-db/wp-sync-db (the latter is essentially the "open source" version of WP Migrate DB Pro. I consider this more of a strategy rather than technical issue, and probably deserves an entire talk about migration strategies alone.

As far as keeping upload folders in sync, my preference is using NFS with private networking. It's quick, easy, and allows for proper file system mounting.

I do feel bad for giving the impression I was trying to market a particular product. Almost all of the packages suggested were FOSS, and created by separate developers. I'm passionate about these particular solutions because of what it delivered for our projects. I wish I had more time to actually demonstrate some of the technologies I covered.

@Jesse: I definitely understand this concern. Many of these solutions are non-trivial to write or engineer, however, most of the dirty work has been written and is available for your consumption and use out of the box. One thing to remember about investments in your workflow is that the efficiencies afforded pay dividends in perpetuity. Even though the gains might not be as great for smaller sites, each subsequent site that you do makes the value proposition that much sweeter.

Without question, not all of these solutions are for everyone. Please take whatever you feel will benefit you. Don't hesitate to contact me even outside of the scope of these solutions.

I've added the slides to the presentation. Please don't hesitate to hit me up if you want some implementation details, mentorship or assistance engineering a solution for any of your challenges.

Thanks again!

Interesting talk. Lots of good information.

As someone who has inherited a number of legacy WordPress sites I was pleasantly surprised by the usefulness of the information in the presentation.

A very fast-paced, terrific talk that was simultaneously high-level and practical. There are a lot of ways to modernize WordPress as a development platform, and I appreciated Eugene's overview of the various build, development, and deployment tools one should consider when choosing to work with WordPress. I've been exploring ways to integrate Composer into my own workflow and improving my deployment strategy, so while this talk didn't show me HOW to do it, the reminder on the importance of WHY to do it was useful.

I felt that the idea to version control and tag your organization's purchased/frequently used plugins and themes was one of the best concepts in here, and I look forward to seeing the completely utility Eugene's team has been working on when it's done.

"WordPress can be tamed - you control the environment" should be a mantra.

I will agree with a previous commenter that the talk came off as somewhat of a marketing piece, perhaps because Eugene was joined on stage the entire time by Austin from Roots. There was enough good information that I don't think this was necessarily detrimental to the talk, but speaking alone (when you're the only listed speaker) may be something to consider if this talk is given again elsewhere.

Eugene's presentation demeanor is flawless — polished, practiced, and in control. The talk was a bit too full of "here's a cool thing we did" and could have benefited from more concrete demonstrations of how we can do it too.