Over the past few months at Van Patten Media, as we’ve geared up toward launching Managed Hosting, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time working on developing a modern development process as well.
In planning, there were several core requirements our process needed to fulfill: multiple remote stages (staging and production environments), a local development environment, version management with Git, and well-integrated asset management, concatentation, and compression.
The pieces have slowly come together, and we’re thrilled to (formally) announce wpframe, our contribution to process-based WordPress development. wpframe is a largely Ruby-based infrastructure that wraps around WordPress, providing you with an easy framework for WordPress development.
How it works
There are a few “levels” to wpframe.
The first level is the “server level“—all the code that provisions your server environment. We chose Puppet as our provisioner, and have configurations included that use nginx, php-fpm, and Varnish.
Our Puppet manifests also provision a Vagrant box, which is great for local development. Our Vagrant environment is currently based off a custom box, but we’re working on a way that you can start with a blank Ubuntu box. Stay tuned.
Second is the “development level“—essentially all the functions that directly affect how you code. In wpframe, that means asset management. We strongly believe in pre-compiling assets, and that’s how wpframe handles them. We use Compass to compile SCSS and Jammit to compile and concatenate JavaScript. Our own tool QuickAssets (more about that soon) handles cache-busting asset URLs.
We’ve also included a basic Guardfile that will automatically compile SCSS and JavaScript on the fly. It also includes live-reload, so you can make changes and see them appear instantly in your browser!
The final level is the “deployment level“. We have a finely-tuned Capistrano configuration in place that handles the deployment of your site. It will upload database credentials (we keep them in a separate YML file—cool, right?), compile assets, and more. Our development version of wpframe also includes a tool to sync databases: we’ll be making it public soon.
Should I use wpframe?
wpframe is not for everyone. You need to be familiar with the command line, and understanding Ruby is probably a bonus too (but to be fair, we’re still learning ourselves). And you probably won’t be able to use it out of the box: it’s built for our workflow, and there may be pieces and parts you don’t need, or want to change.
Still interested? Great! Check it out on Github. Feel free to fork it and make it work for your process. It’s a framework, not a final answer. We’d love to see what you do with it!