Maintaining Retainers as a WordPress Developer
- 1. Working as an Out-of-House Developer, or Maintaining Retainers WordCamp Tampa 2015 - Devin Vinson
- 2. @devinvinson (I mostly retweet and follow so you’ve been warned) Devin Vinson ✦ Developer at Awesome Motive ✦ Maintain the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate ✦ Easily excited
- 3. Baseline Expectations 1. Be there when they need you 2. Track your time 3. Don’t break things Paying in advance to:
- 4. Now add WordPress because why else would we be here right?
- 5. Update all the things (without breaking anything) Local Development + Version Control = Good
- 6. Options for local • VVV (Varying Vagrant Vagrants) • DesktopServer • MAMP • VIP Quickstart (sort of) • Salty WordPress
- 7. Version Control (Git) • http://beanstalkapp.com • https://github.com • https://bitbucket.org • Managed hosting with built in version control
- 8. Workflow 1. Update locally 2. Test 3. Commit changes with git 4. Push up those changes to your live server 5. Login on live 6. Test again
- 11. Plugin updates Read the changelog, look at changes in version control (git)
- 12. Develop new code the same way you update Pretend you didn’t write the new code, test it
- 13. Write better comments //because metabox outputs this array dumb //array of arrays, only get then use the first one
- 14. Make feature plugins Add features and client requests as plugins to help compartmentalize projects
- 15. Some Examples • Button added to tinymce to add drop caps to paragraphs, special text or code snippets • Best-of plugin that uses google analytics data to auto-curate posts • Custom welcome dashboard specific to client
- 16. Keeping up with the industry When the client drops those buzzwords, be ready
- 17. Post Status Club The best and easiest way to keep up with daily WordPress happenings
- 19. I don’t know • I haven’t had a chance to work with that yet • Doesn’t sound familiar, where did you hear of that? • I always love to check out the newest thing but I’ll need to look at it to make sure its been battle tested
- 20. –Everyone at some point “I can put together a quote for that.”
- 21. Build the relationship From one project to the next
- 22. Day to Day • Test and build new things locally • Use Git to version your clients site (theme+plugins) • Keep track of changes in the industry • Enjoy working together with your client to keep things running