Comment by techdragon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by techdragon | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have recommendations for learning Wordpress if you already experienced with modern practices like GitOps and immutable deployment artefacts (containers/VMs) using more fully featured frameworks like Django and Rails, which have abstractions like ORMs and Migration frameworks to look after all your database changes (within reason obviously since we all know these tools aren’t one size fits all) …

I know there’s value in Wordpress even if it’s just potential future revenue supporting a subset of the 1/3rd of the web running on Wordpress. So I’ve pushed but when I loose spend twelve hours over a whole week trying to work out how I’m supposed to manage my database (don’t even get me started on how frustrating it is that you are basically forced to use MySQL) and basically giving up because there both appears to be nothing other than do it yourself with SQL DDL if you don’t want the plug-ins doing it for you, and the fact the web is full of SEO for how to “migrate” your content from one Wordpress site to another hosted somewhere else…

Id love some recommendations as it feels like I’m making an uphill slog through a river of 18 years worth of outdated info posted by users and decaying SEO bacon written by developers.

> Does anyone have recommendations for learning Wordpress if you already experienced with modern practices like GitOps and immutable deployment artefacts (containers/VMs) using more fully featured frameworks like Django and Rails, which have abstractions like ORMs and Migration frameworks to look after all your database changes

Personally, I think trying to apply modern development practice to wordpress development is a waste of time. You're going to fight an uphill battle. Instead, just treat it as a legacy platform and use legacy development methodology: have at least two or three copies of the site (dev, staging and production). Use sftp to live edit the code on dev/staging, then copy to production regularly. Make sure to have a versioned daily backup in place which at least can pull the last 7 days daily backup and the last 6 months monthly backups, and you're set.

If your app is getting too complex for this development method, you can always switch back to django or other modern frameworks with modern tooling.

I agree with this approach. Fortunately, there are managed services specifically for Wordpress that handle all this stuff. Cloudways, WPEngine, there are several others too. Cloudways lets you set up and manage WP using Digital Ocean, Vultr, AWS or GCP if I recall.

I don't see why this would preferred over using something like vvv [0] to develop locally and then pull changes from a repository to a production site. That's how I've been doing it for my personal site and it works like a charm.

[0]: https://varyingvagrantvagrants.org/

What's great about this tool? since you can use Ansible to install Wordpress and more.

You use VVV for local development. Ansible is certainly something you can use to deploy.

Use the official docs instead of going off what people say to do on stackoverflow and the other wp seo spam sites out there. The snippets are often not optimized correctly, using an outdated method, or just insecure.

I suggest going through the VIP docs as well as they have some really good advice on securing and speeding up wordpress along with what to avoid.

https://docs.wpvip.com/technical-references/

Also just a tip: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress-Coding-Standards

https://pantheon.io/ has WordPress plans with dev/staging/prod sites integrated with git. If you want git, I would highly recommend trying their system out rather than trying to figure out how to make WP cooperate on your own. WP installs normally don't use a VCS at all.

Don't try to use WP for anything involving a lot of programming. It will just hold you back. Use it for projects simple enough that you don't mind writing a few MySQL DDL statements with DIY migrations.

Get your local environment set up (Linux, nginx, PHP, MySQL), then configure Netbeans with xdebug, and start stepping through the code.

I think this is probably both the most painful and most useful way to learn how Wordpress works under the hood. It will probably take you another 12 hours (and another week), but at least those hours won't be wasted.

Edit: oh, and take notes while stepping through with the debugger. Having a document you can refer to later that has some kind of outline with your own ideas and opinions is a huge help.

I haven't looked too deeply into corcel [0] but it does give you some kind of interaction between Eloquent ORM and WordPress.

[0]: https://github.com/corcel/corcel

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