I previously wrote a post about running WordPress on AWS Lambda, but it was before EFS support was announced (EFS is a managed network file system AWS provides). Being able to use EFS completely changes the way WordPress works in Lambda (for the better!), so I felt it warranted a new blog post.
In addition, this time I’m using Terraform instead of SAM. This matches the existing infrastructure-as-code setup I use when I deploy infrastructure for clients. Here’s the Terraform module ( source code).
I noticed that most of the good discussion I was having about blog posts were on App.net. Turns out, many other people feel the same way, and there’s even an official App.net comments widget!
I’ve been testing a WordPress plugin to replace the default WordPress comments with ADN comments on this site for quite a while, so I decided to publish it in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Just search for “ADN Comments”, and it should be the first result.
I recently gave a quick talk about how I use Nginx, HHVM, MariaDB with WordPress on this blog at the March WordPress Meetup in Tokyo. Here are the slides:
I’ve published a Vagrant template for the setup detailed in the slides.
Update 2014/4/17: This site now runs WordPress 3.9, which seems to be working fine with HHVM. Also, compatibility has improved, thanks to a patch in the WordPress core specifically for HHVM.
I recently posted about how I switched out PHP-FPM (PHP’s FastCGI pool) for HHVM. Today I’ll be talking more about the install process on the server, and using it to set up WordPress.
This is usually what happens in a (successful) startup[footnote]Twitter is (in)famous for its use of Ruby on Rails, which eventually had to be re-written in Scala, a language that runs on the JVM.[/footnote]:
The ease of making a WordPress theme is both a blessing and a curse. It allows people to get started with programming relatively easy – most hosting providers have PHP / MySQL, and the majority have a WordPress quick-install. However, this easiness comes with a dangerous pitfall – it’s easy to do the wrong thing. The classic example of this is query_posts (hint: never use it).
Today, I’ll talk about wp_enqueue_script and wp_enqueue_style. If you have ever made a plugin that requires additional stylesheets or scripts in the front-end, you know exactly what this is (and why it’s important).
Rails Turbolinks is pretty cool, right? I thought it would be pretty cool to use it on WordPress, too.
There are probably a lot of bugs, and it probably doesn’t work well with JavaScript-heavy sites. I’ve included the jQuery compatibility layer, but it’s still not perfect. Use at your own risk.
To install, just search the WordPress plugin repository for “turbolinks”
Or, available for download here:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-turbolinks/ Contributors welcome!!!
WordPress 3.7 was just released.
Although there are quite a few features in this release, I want to talk about what I feel is the most important feature: automatic updates.
It’s a fairly simple - when a new version of WordPress is released, your installation will be updated (almost) immediately. As of 3.7, these automatic updates are limited to minor maintenance releases to make sure they won’t break your theme or plugin.
I’ve been playing around with Vagrant recently. It really is a great tool for setting up development environments quickly and cleanly - no more local MySQL databases with 100 separate databases!
There are a few ways to solve this problem that many WordPress developers have:
I’m going to be talking about the last option, Vagrant, in this blog post. I’ll list out a few reasons why Vagrant was attractive to me in the first place:
Just writing to let you know that I’ve switched servers for this blog! I’ve been meaning to get this on to a faster server that I have control over for awhile, and I finally got around to doing it.
For those of you who are curious, this site is being served by WordPress Multisite, on a Sakura 2G VPS.
And because everyone likes talking about stacks:
Kidding.
That’s it! There is some moderate caching in most layers (WordPress Object Cache, APC, NGINX, etc), but nothing too drastic. It’s much faster now than it was on the previous server - we’ll see how this one holds up.
A week ago, I posted Automate your Workflow: Local WordPress Install with a script that helps you install new WordPress installations. I’ve been using it regularly, and have made some improvements:
-l switch)-v nightly)-v {code in the 'Version' column})-u {URL})As always, the script is available as a gist.
Lately, I’ve been pretty obsessed with streamlining my workflow, which means writing scripts (read: building tools to do stuff for me). They say that the best programmers are the laziest; I can’t vouch for being a great programmer, but I can proudly say that I am pretty lazy.
So, I’ve decided to start cleaning up my tools and posting them here as I make them. Use at your own risk!