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As WordPress matures into a full-fledged CMS and more and more large online publishers come to rely on the platform, the practice of developing and deploying websites becomes increasingly important. High-profile members of the WordPress community, such as core developer Mark Jaquith and Cristi Burca, have spoken on the topic and built tools such as WP-CLI and WP Stack to improve the professionalism of our administration and deployment.
But what I’m really interested in is the current state of WordPress deployment: how an average developer manages the deployment of their websites, and how can we improve as a community?
In late July 2012, I conducted a short survey to help me answer these questions. The survey was open for three months and drew a modest but not insignificant 327 respondents. This article documents the results of the survey and draws some conclusions about where education is needed and how we can help each other become more professional when deploying our WordPress websites.
In my survey, I asked a few questions to establish the demographic that’s working with WordPress; this was obviously already done in far greater detail with the WordPress user and developer survey, but I felt that getting a sense of who was responding to this survey was important. Of the 327 respondents, 43% self-identified as developers, 10% as designers, 40% as both designers and developers and 7% other.
The vast majority were located in the North America (50%) and Europe (38%), with the following continents also registering: Asia (6%), Australia (4%), Africa (3%) and South America (1%). I also asked respondents how they would categorize the businesses they work for. Here’s how they responded:
The results were overwhelmingly in favor of freelancing (46%), with small businesses (19%) and small agencies (17%) taking a close second and third place, respectively. These figures back up accepted knowledge that WordPress is largely used by small internal Web teams, regional Web agencies and freelancers. Finally, as with the WordPress user and developer survey, I asked respondents whether they made their living from WordPress. This was relatively evenly split, with a small majority of 59% saying yes.
That said, of those who identified themselves as developers, 67% said they earn their living from WordPress, which suggests that WordPress developers are generally more inclined to stick with one platform than designers, who are perhaps more agonistic.
Now we get to the meat of the survey, how respondents actually deploy their WordPress websites. Combined, the 327 respondents maintain 6,378.5 WordPress websites — yes, someone maintains half a WordPress website. The majority of respondents manage a fairly small number of websites, with 46% looking after fewer than 10. That said, an impressive 8% manage between 30 and 40 websites, and, incredibly, one person is responsible for 700. Below is a breakdown of the numbers.
| Number of websites | Number of respondents |
|---|---|
| Fewer than 10 | 149 |
| 10 – 20 | 109 |
| 20 – 30 | 26 |
| 50 – 100 | 7 |
| 100 – 200 | 4 |
| 200 – 500 | 1 |
| 500 – 1000 | 1 |
I asked all respondents whether they use version control and, if so, which software they favor. Astonishingly (at least to me), 45% of respondents said they do not use version-control software at all as part of their workflow. Of the remaining 55%, Git was by far the most popular, taking 41% of the vote, and Subversion surprisingly accounted for only 9%. Drilling down a little deeper, 28% of those who identify themselves as a developer stated that they do not use version control, and 48% of those who are both developers and designers said the same. Here’s a breakdown of overall responses on version-control software:
Next, I asked respondents what method of deploying websites they favor. These I broke down into FTP, SFTP, SCP, SSH + version control, SSH + version control + Capistrano, and other. Again, somewhat shocking for me was to find that FTP took 49% of the vote, followed by SFTP (20%) and SSH + version control (17%). My preferred method, SSH + version control + Capistrano, got only 3% of the vote; but even with so low a number, I was pretty encouraged to hear that people out there take the time to work in this manner.
I asked respondents whether they maintain different environments for their WordPress websites — that is, whether they set up local, test, staging and live environments. Answering yes didn’t require that they run all of these environments, but simply that they differentiate between the website they develop on, the website on which they show changes to a client and the live website. The vast majority of respondents (75%) indeed do this, which is great news.
An important facet and constant pain point of running multiple environments is the need to alter URLs in the WordPress database when migrating the database from one environment to another. I asked respondents how they typically deal with this problem and gave them an open field to type their answer. Here are some answers that came up repeatedly. These aren’t actual responses, but rather my representation of groups of similar replies.
“I don’t migrate between staging and live databases.”
“I don’t touch the database. I just export and import posts out of and into WordPress.”
“I use Dave Coveney’s PHP script for finding and replacing URLs in the database, including those in serialized data.”
“I do a find-and-replace on the SQL dump and the website’s files.”
“It’s a massive pain in the arse, and I steer clear of it.”
“I dunno. What is the best practice on this?”
Finally, to gauge how strictly people adhere to general best practices, I asked respondents whether they ever cheekily edit code on the live server. Let’s be honest: this question is only ever going to yield one outcome. As expected, a whopping 76% owned up to having tweaked some WordPress production code in their time.
In reviewing the lessons learned, it’s important to say up front that I am not criticizing the development and deployment practices of the survey’s respondents. The goal was to identify the areas where we, as a community, can become more professional and to draw some conclusions on how we might achieve that. You’ll find no finger-wagging or hyper-critical feedback for developers — just broad conclusions drawn from the responses.
First, clearly not enough of us are using version control in our everyday workflow. This is a fundamental tool for any developer, and for 61% of those who self-identify as a developer or as both a designer and developer to say that they don’t use version control indicates that effort is needed in the WordPress community to educate developers on the importance of source-control management.
Still, while not enough WordPress developers use version control, that so many who do use Git is very positive. I prefer the decentralized approach of Git, and while WordPress’ core team still uses (and will likely continue to use) Subversion, Git brings many benefits. Suppose a few teams are working on a project. Each team could write to its own repository, and then a senior member of the quality-assurance team or an administrator could merge changes from all of those repositories into a protected repository before deploying the website. This approach makes a lot of sense if the website you’re working on is large and members of your team are dispersed, and it’s why I favor Git.
While a lot has been done to grapple with the issues arising from WordPress storing URLs in the database, the problem goes beyond WordPress’ core and extends to plugins and even to the pesky URLs ending up in serialized data. This is a pain in the arse at best, and a complete time-suck at worst. There are many options for overcoming this, but the most common choice is either not to migrate data from environment to environment at all or to use Dave Coveney’s PHP script. Both have their problems. For me, the first just isn’t viable, and the second, while perfectly acceptable, isn’t automated enough and is pretty time-consuming. There has to be a better option.
Free and premium tools and plugins offer solutions to this problem. One that came up a lot in the survey’s results was BackupBuddy and its migration feature. I’ve played around with its functionality, and, while it works perfectly well, it does not (as yet) work with Multisite, and I actually found the process more arduous than using a find-and-replace script. One project of mine that has emerged from this survey is to automate the find-and-replace process with a tool for Capistrano.
The survey’s results have shown the need for more education on professional deployment practices. Mark Jaquith’s talk “Scaling, Servers, and Deploys, Oh My!” is a must-watch for anyone deploying WordPress websites. And the WP Stack project on Github and WP-CLI are also worth checking out if you’re interested in breaking free of the browser and speeding up your administration of WordPress websites. For my part, I plan to start blogging more about professional WordPress deployment practices and to release more Capistrano tools on Github. Finally, I would love to hear in the comments section about the kinds of issues that you’d like to see covered in future posts and of any other projects that are moving this issue forward.
(al)
© Kieran Masterton for Smashing Magazine, 2013.
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The April edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, jQuery plugins and JavaScript resources, mobile apps, educational resources, mockup kits, frameworks, web development tools, coding resources, and some really great new fonts.
Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.
As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments. And if you have an app or other resource you’d like to see included next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman for consideration.
Gridwax is a bookmarklet that lets you easily add an adjustable vertical baseline to any site right in your browser. Just install the bookmark, click on it, and then adjust the height with your arrow keys.
Chardin.js makes it simple to add overlay instructions to your apps via a jQuery plugin. It’s easy to install and configure.
Photolettering is a free iOS app that lets you add text to photos you take within the app or images from your camera roll. It features some great fonts from House Industries, including Elephant, Kerpow, and Aztek.
Learn CSS Layout is a tutorial site that teaches you CSS layout techniques beyond the basics. It includes lessons on the box model, positioning, CSS frameworks, media queries, and much more.
UX Apprentice teaches you the principles of UX design with a layered approach, including discovery, strategy, and design. It includes information on the core principles of each layer, as well as real life examples and resources for each.
dsgnjbs aggregates the best design jobs from a variety of design websites, including Dribbble, Behance, Smashing Magazine, 37 Signals, and more.
Flat UI is a free web user interface kit that includes buttons, menu items, inputs, checkboxes and radio buttons, tooltips, and many more basic design elements.
FlatDesign is a showcase of designs with flat UIs. It includes everything from apps to portfolios to event sites.
TimeJump lets you add deep links to HTML5 audio and video content with a standardized API based on the YouTube deep-linking syntax.
The SVG Patterns Gallery is a collection of SVG patterns complete with code. SVG images are smaller than bitmap images generally, and stay sharp on high resolution displays.
Inkwell.io is a handmade sketch kit specifically for web and app designers that comes with all the tools you might want to sketching mockups and wireframes.
This Flat+3D Mockup Kit makes it easy to create attractive mockups for your apps on a wide variety of devices. There are free and paid kits included, depending on which devices you need.
Ivory is a simple, powerful, responsive front-end grid framework that easily scales from 1200px right down to 320px wide. It has a flexible layout with 12 fluid columns, is supported on the latest versions of all major modern browsers, and it’s easy to use.
Mixture is a rapid prototyping and static site builder tool that works with your favorite editor. It supports various boilerplates, as well as support for creating your own.
Kippt lets you build an online library for collecting research, stories, inspiration, and notes. You can make your collections private or public, or just share them with specific people.
Photoset Grid is a jQuery plugin that lets you arrange images into a flexible grid, inspired by Tumblr’s photoset feature. It was originally created for the Style Hatch Tumblr themes, but is now available for use outside of themes.
SuperBox is a jQuery plugin that works as a static image gallery that reveals the full size version when an image is clicked on.
Want to create responsive mega dropdowns like Amazon’s? jQuery Menu Aim helps make mega dropdowns more useful by anticipating the user’s mouse movement to open submenus rather than delays and timeouts.
Retinise.js is a jQuery plugin that “retinizes” the inline images on your site using “data-src” instead of “src”, so it only pulls the image you need rather than loading multiple versions.
Is a Follower is a little piece of JavaScript that adds a status indicator to a Dribbble user’s profile to show you whether they’re following you. It’s available as a bookmarklet, a Greasemonkey script for Firefox, or a Chrome extension.
Mobify.js is an open source library that makes it easy to adapt your site for any device. It captures and manipulates your site’s DOM before resources are downloaded, enabling resource control, conditional loading, and more.
Intro.js lets you add an easy step-by-step guide to introduce users to your site or app. It’s fast and small, and offers both keyboard and mouse navigation.
Animatable lets you easily animate all sorts of properties, including background-color, background-position, border-width, font-size, color, border-radius, opacity, and much more.
Accounting.js is a JS library for number, money, and currency formatting. It even includes Excel-style column rendering for lining up symbols and decimals.
Bespoke.js is a DIY presentation micro-framework that offers a number of different slide animations, including coverflow, cube, and carousel, among others.
Soundtrack Volume is a handdrawn typeface that comes in two weights. It’s a lively all-caps font with contextual alternates.
Press Style is a distressed sans serif display font. It has upper and lowercase letters, as well as a fairly large number of accents and symbols (especially for a free font).
Dottie Daze is a handdrawn display font with dotted accents.
Futura FH Custom is based on Futura, with added accents, making it a great display font. It’s free for personal and commercial use.
Langdon is a serious, dependable font that’s free for personal and commercial use.
Cyclope is a distressed sans serif typeface that’s free for personal use (commercial use requires a donation).
Defeated is a new display font with abstract letterforms that’s free for personal and commercial use.
Benito is a proportional, geometric woodtype with six styles: print, stencil, and clean, each with italics.
Imperious is a funky geometric font that includes more than 450 ligatures.
Naive Inline is a handwritten serif type family with three weights. It was a very Parisian feel, and allows for a ribbed or full bicolor interior.
Know of a new app or resource that should have been included but wasn’t? Let us know in the comments!
| 600+ Handcrafted Icons & Ribbon/Badges Set – only $10! |
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Hear the word “drones” nowadays, and your likely to conjure images of unmanned war-machines raining fire and chaos upon unsuspecting targets in a remote
mountainous al-Qaeda stronghold.
Certainly, much controversy has surrounded the use of the unmanned vessels in the War on Terror and the potential implications for counter-terrorism and warfare.
But what about the drones that may potentially hover within our own airspace? What if the person behind the remote control is in fact your own neighbor? Your friend?
(Unmanned surveillance vehicle, courtesy of bbc.co.uk)
That is exactly the question that Google head Eric Schmidt raised in a recent interview with the Guardian. Expressing his concerns over cheaper, smaller unmanned surveillance bots, he posed this:
“You’re having a dispute with your neighbor…How would you feel if your neighbour went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their backyard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?”
Schmidt evidently is far from alone in this concern. Idaho’s Gov. C.L. Otter signed a recently-passed state law confining the use of unmanned drones to solely police and other public officials, to prevent privacy violations by citizens upon each other.
We may even have to start worrying of prying eyes overhead from PETA, who has announced its plan to purchase its own private fleet of drones to monitor for signs of illegal activity among hunters in the United States.
That the line between public and private is becoming more and more blurred is becoming more apparent by the day. Nonetheless, it has to be somewhat unsettling when the intrusive eyes we have to watch for from above are not those of Big Brother—but from the shady neighbor down the street.
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Guantanamo Bay has been popping up more and more in the news lately after many prisoners began a hunger strike to protest their confinement. Read more about what’s going on, including Saturday’s violent confrontation between guards and detainees, here.
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So… you think Google maps has given you headaches?
Just be thankful you don’t live in Lithuania.
Five years ago, Google rolled out a series of extensive updates to its Google Maps application including a more refined search view and more detailed terrain. But now, people in the Baltic country are probably wishing the maps were a little less useful.
After Street View was released in the country earlier this year, Lithuanian tax authorities were able to nail 100 homeowners and 30 construction companies for avoiding taxes.
By using the application to inspect land in major cities, the officials were able to look into suspicious properties and pinpoint homes built where they shouldn’t have been.
But while some applaud the country’s innovative use of the application, others maintain that it violates the privacy of homeowners.
The Lithuanian revenue agency has dismissed these claims, saying that it made sure to discuss security concerns with Google and lawyers before proceeding with the project. Karolis Liutkevicius, a lawyer at the Human Rights Monitoring Institute in Vilnius, agrees:
“If they were using it as [their] sole tool, then it could possibly be qualified as a violation. But in this case it’s just using a modern resource.”
What do you think? Is this making good use of resources, or is it a case of technology gone too far? Let us know in the comments below.
]]>Currencies designed to fix perceived flaws in Bitcoin could lead to competition that makes the idea of digital “cryptocurrency” stick.
In recent weeks, the digital currency Bitcoin has soared and then dipped in value, along the way attracting more public attention than ever before and speculation as to whether it could become an established and widely accepted way to pay for goods and services.
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