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
- 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
- 12. Develop new code the
same way you update
Pretend you didn’t write the new code, test it
- 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
- 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
- 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