I just wanted to share real quickly (because I’m pretty stoked) that after months (really, years) of development I finally have what I consider a professional workflow for WordPress development.

Below is a graphical representation of what takes place. But it breaks down to this (with Git, but can easily be accomplished with SVN as well):

1. Pull down the Github repository
2. Develop locally at local.example.com
3. Commit changes and push to Github
4. Push to Beanstalk if you want changes immediately pushed to dev.example.com
5. Merge master to production and push to Github and Beanstalk
6. The production branch is automatically deployed to staging
7. Manually deploy to production from within Beanstalk

Notes:

• Local and Dev share a database (but don’t have to)
• Staging and Production share a database (but staging only has read access)

You can fork the Denton Bible Church Website even if you just want to use this is a framework for your project.This is built off of Hybrid Enterprise which is a cleaner repository that accomplishes the same thing.

Finally, and sadly, I am still looking for the best multi-environment database solution. Ideally, a fourth environment would be used to make content changes against the latest production branch code and then changes would be selectively deployed to the production database. WordPress 3.6 almost had a great solution.

WordPress is somewhat notorious for using absolute URLs in its linking to images and other posts within content. Many have argued for both sides.

It’s quite simple for me: relative URLs are easier for development, absolute URLs are smarter for live websites.

There’s a compromise to be had.

WordPress should add these shortcodes to core:

• [home_url]
• [uploads_directory_url]

This enables the user and the WordPress editor to insert links to other pages and media on the site while maintaining its given site domain and path. Developers would no longer have to find and replace all instances of the home URL when importing a local database to another environment.

When linking to another page on the site, WordPress could insert [home_url]?p=203, maintaining a lifetime of environment changes and domain moves without broken URLs.

Or, when linking to an image: [uploads_directory_url]/2013/01/example.jpg. Actually, I think linking to media needs to be completely rethought (i.e. [media id="100"] would render whatever image path was associated with that media ID. This would allow you to update an image in the media library and have the image update everywhere it exists on your site).