WordPress … the free software platform available for motivated internet enthusiasts to setup their own website, while focusing more on the content to share with their community. Supported by the combined and continuous improvement of thousands of contributers who keep the WordPress platform thriving.
Download, install, configure and explore hundreds of standard WordPress features plus thousands of customised Plugins and Themes to extend what the platform can do.
Always striving to combine simplicity for website owners, users and publishers; with under-the-hood flexability for maintainers and developers.
Like all internet hosted platforms, the enterprise maturity of running a Production environment is a shared responsability. Each service provider contributes to the journey, looking after their focused specality, leaving the website owner to be ultimately accountable for the whole show.
It can be a steep learning curve if you are running the whole platform on your own dedicated server; while performing maintenance activities yourself, minimising service dependancies, optimising performance and engaging with your community.
Ultimately, there are plenty of options and combinations available enable a true choose-your-own-adventure for the responsabilities you do, defer, delegate or ignore.
In turn, this convience seems to naturally start with a singular Production system, then the maturing enterprise processes solidify, as an after-thought when the business gets burned by avoidable incidents. Unlike larger enterprises, with a healthy awareness of overlapping technology, policy, processes and portfolio profiles will skip that cowboy phase; starting with at least a 2 tier landscape architecture … a Development Tier and a Production Tier.
As technology has evolved over the decades with the usual pendulums of focus and priority swinging (software vs hardware, optimised opcodes vs abstracted reusable library layers, security vs convienence, etc) there is always an underlying intersection where capability & process meets risk & reward. It is always a dance, no matter what your bias or pre-judgement might be.
In the end, there is no absolute right or wrong way to maintain your WordPress website or manage the application and content updates. There are only consequences to chose, while you get what you get along the journey.
Just make sure you start, plan, act, learn, decide, grow and pivot to evolve the processes and priorities that work for your WordPress website adventure.
One way to continue evolving your adventure would be to look at the existing Production backup and restore process.
- [Production] Can you restore a Production backup into the Production environment, at a moments notice and be confident of the outcome? Like, as a way to rewind a major upgrade that failed basic validation.
- [Test] Can you restore a Production backup into a Test environment, to conduct private internal investigations under-the-hood and not directly impact Production.
- [Development] Can you restore a Production backup into a local Development environment on your personal computer and be confident it won’t mis-behave with the stale production data or interfere with the real Production environment resources?
Those last 2 scenarios is where website maintainers and developers would get the most benefit day-to-day, while trying to lower the Production risk profile … if only they could ensure that the instant the Production backup was restored, it new it was no longer in the Production environment. This is where a Landscape Tiers plugin for WordPress could automatically apply passive limits and optional aggressive actions to protect the Production data and Production environment from that restored backup that is no longer in the Production environment.
Who am I?
My name is John Lang, an Aussie from the land down under, with 40-ish years experience in building practical computer solutions. Originally, a solid foundation in application programming, internet technologies, distributed computing, SAP Business Warehouse (BW) and HANA Data Modelling; which has evolved into leading project teams to deliver successful outcomes for their clients, customers and user communities.
I started this website because my WordPress development journey involves occasionally frustrating administration activities. Every now and then, when I wanted to tinker and dig deeper into a topic, I’d waste a few hours getting the required local development environment and services back up and running on my personal computer. The missing software services, the mis-behaving PHP step-debugger and full log files would distract me from the real goal of being able to quickly explore an idea and prove a code-snippet works.
My passion is to find practical solutions that help fellow explorers overcome their challenges with using a PHP local development environment for WordPress. This allows a truly curious website maintainer, developer and tester to get on with the adventure of delivering; while minimising the time and effort spent on repetitive activities.
Survey – What is Stopping You?
If you are sick and tired of wasting time finding just the right configuration required to quickly start-up a local WordPress development environment on your personal computer, then vent your frustraightion and tell me …
What is Stopping you from having the WordPress Development environment you Desire?