Category Archives: General
Not all WordPress sites are created equal
WordPress 7.0 was released yesterday.
With significant changes around media handling, block behavior, rendering, and modern developer workflows, it’s worth talking about the operational side of upgrading modern WordPress sites.
There’s a lot to cover, so let’s start with one important reality:
Not all WordPress sites are created equal.
Broadly speaking, there are at least two very different operational models.
The first is publisher-style sites: newsrooms, media organizations, active editorial teams, high-volume content operations.
On those sites, once the upgrade happens, the content and data state of the site may begin changing almost immediately through:
- newly published posts
- media uploads
- automatically generated revisions
- editorial workflow activity
- taxonomy and metadata changes
- feed ingestions and other plugin-driven content creation
At that point, rollback becomes much more complicated — if not practically impossible — because new content, metadata, revisions, and workflow activity immediately become intertwined with the upgraded application and database state.
In other words, once a busy production site begins operating on the new version, it can become very difficult to cleanly separate “newly created content” from “changes introduced by the upgrade itself.”
Contrast that with a relatively static marketing site or low-change business website: if a problem is discovered a day later, there’s often a much cleaner path to restoring from a previous snapshot because comparatively little content changed after the upgrade.
That’s why “Should we upgrade immediately?” is often less about WordPress itself and more about operational workflow, rollback strategy, and how actively the site changes day to day.
Modern WordPress operations increasingly look like application lifecycle management, not simple website maintenance.
Posted originally to LInkedin here.
Compatible up to: 7.0
WordPress 7.0 was released less than a week ago, and one interesting operational reality is how long it can take compatibility information to catch up across the plugin ecosystem.
A plugin displaying “Compatible up to: 7.0” usually reflects a manual process:
- testing against the new version
- updating plugin metadata
- committing changes to WordPress.org
- allowing those updates to move through publishing, review, and propagation processes
Many major commercial and actively maintained plugins already showed WordPress 7.0 compatibility on release day.
But across a massive plugin ecosystem, compatibility metadata naturally takes time to catch up with operational reality.
I spot-checked a few production sites and already found several high-quality, widely used plugins still displaying “Compatible up to: 6.9.4” in the WordPress plugin details dialog.
Are those plugins broken on WordPress 7.0?
Probably not.
But should upgrades still be validated carefully before deployment onto production systems?
Absolutely.
That is the important operational distinction:
A plugin showing an older compatibility version does not automatically mean the plugin is incompatible with WordPress 7.0.
The real question is:
“How does this application behave inside our environment, with our plugins, workflows, integrations, caching layers, and infrastructure stack?”
That is why staging environments matter.
A staging environment is not merely a preview site. It is a private, operationally identical clone of production where upgrades, plugins, caching behavior, media handling, workflows, and deployment assumptions can be validated safely before release to live traffic.
That word — identical — matters.
Because as WordPress deployments become larger and more operationally sophisticated, upgrade strategy increasingly becomes a question of workflow, validation, rollback planning, and application lifecycle management — not simply whether a button labeled “Update” exists.
Posted originally to LinkedIn here…
Dusting off the cobwebs
Haven’t touched this site in a while, but bringing it back as a working space.
I’ll be using it as a test bed for PressHarbor updates and to explore what’s new in WordPress — including Studio, MCP, cloud connections, and whatever else shows up along the way.
Expect a mix of notes, experiments, and half-finished ideas.
Updated to WordPress 3.7.1
Updated to WordPress 3.7.1… Haven’t blogged in a long long while. Need to update the WordPress iOS app and get up to date on the integration there…
WordPress local dev tips: DB & plugins « Mark on WordPress: Running a WordPress site on your local machine is a great way to do development. I’ve taken advantage of this to do development while on flights (and yes, I realize that in about 5 years it’s going to seem positively quaint that there used to be flights without Internet access).
WordPress 3.2 Beta
Love the new full screen editor… So refreshing to create content on a blank screen…
Also now using the new Twenty Eleven theme on this blog. Not so sure about that. The giant header image doesn’t really do it for me.
Read more about the beta features here.
links for 2011-02-09
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A lot of people have been debating back and forth lately about post formats and custom post formats. This discussion also gets all confused with post types, and custom taxonomies, and categories, and tags… It’s time for some clarity. Mark had a really good post on the topic, but I think this needs to be explored in more detail.
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Custom Post Types: These were poorly named. Think: Custom Content Types. That is, non-post content. Examples: employees, products, attachments, menu items, pages, pets. If you want it to show up in your site’s main RSS feed, then it’s probably not a custom post type.
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In general, taxonomies are used to arrange, classify and group things. By default, Taxonomies in WordPress are tags and categories that WordPress is using for the posts. Apart from these two, WordPress makes it possible for theme developers to create their own taxonomies which are created within the functions.php theme file. This is what we are going to cover today. We will learn how to work with Custom WordPress taxonomies.
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Finally, WordPress version 3 gives us fully hierarchical custom taxonomies. Notice how the hierarchical nature allows us to simplify the Operating System taxonomy, for instance, by pushing all the different Windows variants under a “Windows” parent classification. This will allow visitors to see all posts classified with any Windows operating system, or allow them to be more specific and see only posts classified with Windows XP, for instance.
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In this guide, we’ll go through the process of creating and using your own custom post type. More specifically, we will create an "Event" post type for your special events and dates, sort of like a calendar.
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A custom taxonomy is exactly what it sounds like — a custom way to relate disparate content together. Custom taxonomies can be applied to custom post types or to regular pages and posts.
links for 2011-02-05
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This bash script will let you replicate a WordPress MU blog environment from live installation into a sandbox, altering and rewriting wp-config.php and database entries to make sure URLs work the right way.
ProFounder Launches To Help Small Businesses Crowdsource Fundraising
ProFounder Launches To Help Small Businesses Crowdsource Fundraising: “ProFounder, which has been in private beta for the past year, offers entrepreneurs two ways to raise money on the site: through a private fundraising round, and/or a public fundraising round. The private fundraising rounds allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues with investors (their friends, family, and community) over time. Essentially, this type of fundraising round is an offering of securities, and ProFounder helps facilitate compliance with state and federal laws related to this offering.
Public fundraising rounds allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of revenues with both investors (anyone can participate – friends, family, community, and general public too) as well as a nonprofit organization. For both public and private fundraising rounds, ProFounder has a limit of $1 million raised.”
(Via TechCrunch.)
Fascinating idea…
links for 2010-11-27
links for 2010-09-01
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Easily the most advanced wireframe software, OverSite™, lets you quickly define the hierarchy of your website or application. Create sections and subsections, then fill them with pages and screens. Rearrange your structure with OverSite's easy drag-and-drop interface.
Once you've done all that, OverSite will automatically generate a graphical map of your site or application. Any changes you make to your structure will instantly be reflected in the graphical map. Of course, you can control the look—fonts, colors, sizes, spacing, etc—of the map. OverSite then allows you to print the map, or export it to any number of graphic formats.
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Fake is a new browser for Mac OS X that makes web automation simple. Fake allows you to drag discrete browser Actions into a graphical Workflow that can be run again and again without human interaction. The Fake Workflows you create can be saved, reopened, and shared.
links for 2010-07-14
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iThemes Builder is a powerful, flexible, easy-to-use WordPress theme designed to allow you to quickly build websites and blogs with WordPress. With Builder’s innovative Layout Engine, you can build almost any layout you’d like within minutes. Then bling out your site with graphics and styling.
Squarespace takes funding according to Gigaom
Via Gigaom – Squarespace Gets $38M to Compete With WordPress and Six Apart: Squarespace, a hosted content service that competes with companies such as WordPress (see disclosure below) has closed a $38-million financing round from two leading technology VCs — Accel Partners and Index Ventures — that will give the seven-year-old company a significant warchest and some substantial backing in the battle for digital-publishing market share.
Best quote:
…the idea that a major media entity can be published using the same tools that bloggers use (the site is based on Moveable Type from Six Apart), and that blog software can be a competitor for the expensive and time-consuming content-management systems that are used by many traditional media outlets — some of which use WordPress and other tools to publish their blogs, but few of which have moved to using such tools for their entire websites.
Wishing them success. I’ve never used the tool but its users are enthusiastic.
links for 2010-07-13
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The premier network for reaching creative, web and design professionals, The Deck serves up approximately one-hundred million ad impressions each month and is uniquely configured to connect the right marketers to a targeted, influential audience.
Just wrapped up migrating nearly 20 WordPress sites from a customer’s fleet onto our new PressHarbor platform, built on Automattic’s WP Cloud infrastructure.
One thing stood out:
Long-running WordPress sites carry a lot of history. The good and the bad.
One of the things I enjoy seeing during a well-executed migration is that history being preserved.
When a migration is performed using tools like rsync, file modification timestamps can be preserved along with the files themselves. It’s surprisingly satisfying to see an image uploaded in 2014 still showing a 2014 modification date after arriving on the new platform.
But history isn’t just found in file timestamps.
It’s also found in the plugin list.
Many of these sites carried image optimization plugins, CDN plugins, caching plugins, and various performance tools that solved very real problems when they were installed.
Those choices weren’t mistakes. In many cases they were exactly the right solution at the time.
But platforms evolve. WordPress evolves.
Today we’re running on a platform with a built-in CDN, integrated edge caching, image optimization, and dynamic image resizing capabilities that simply weren’t available when many of these sites were first optimized.
It raises an interesting question:
How many of the optimizations on a site are still solving today’s problems, and how many are solving yesterday’s?
Sometimes the best optimization isn’t adding another plugin.
It’s removing the ones you no longer need.