WordPress has had its first real public drama the last few weeks, and there has been concern over the future of the project. As we host hundreds of WordPress sites in different configurations, this affects us and our clients tremendously.

If you’re not familiar with the goings on behind the scenes of the world’s biggest content management system, we’ll sum it up briefly:

Recently, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, and co-founder of the WordPress publishing software, went on the attack against WP Engine, one of the largest and most established WordPress hosting companies in the industry. The details of the disagreement are complex, and not entirely relevant to this communication.

WordPress also took control of and renamed a very popular plugin that was maintained by WP Engine, “Advanced Custom Fields”. This plugin is used in many of our websites and extends the functionality of WordPress considerably.

This situation has caused uncertainty and confusion in the development community. Our main priority is the security and stability of the websites we maintain. Our sites depend heavily on all parties involved in this disagreement, so we hope for an amicable solution in the near future.

What this might mean for the websites we host and maintain

 in the short term is connecting the WordPress updates and plugins to the appropriate tool they were built with. Most of this is “behind the scenes” and will not affect our clients. However, there may be some situations where a small amount of billable time is necessary to keep a website secure and stable. We will communicate directly with those clients if and when necessary.

We thank all of our clients for their trust. Clients host their websites with us so that they don’t have to feel the stress of these situations, and that’s exactly our intention in communicating these important events.

Depending on how these disagreements are resolved, we may have updates in the future. Stay tuned. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions you may have. We’re here to help!

Sincerely, 
Jason Clark
Chief Marketing Officer
VIA Studio / eResources


Hosting

WordPress

An update on the current WordPress situation

Deploying code bases to staging and production websites can be done a million ways, with the bare minium manually FTP'ing the files over or at the other end Docker boxes that build and deploy. At VIA, historically we have used 

 to handle this for us. As time has gone on, we found ourselves wanting to move to something more nimble and that fit more of our current workflow. Enter 

GitHub Actions are basically workflows that are trigged by Git actions and live inside GitHub. For example, you want to build and deploy to production when a branch is merged into main.

GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want.

Actions are written as YAML files and live in the.github folder in the project repo.

For an example scenario, let's say we have a small WordPress website hosted on WP-Engine that needs its theme built as part of the deployment. The workflow will consist of the trigger, setup, build, and deployment.

The trigger is simple, since we want to start the workflow when a branch is merged into main, our production branch.

Next we want to setup the virtual box and dependencies, such as Node. GitHub Actions allows you to configure things such as PHP version, Python version, etc... In this example, we are using latest Ubuntu box, Node 18x, and installing the root and theme Node dependencies. 

Note that npm ci is used instead of npm i, as 

 "in automated environments such as test platforms, continuous integration, and deployment".

Now that everything is setup and installed, the theme can be built

The final step is deployment. With GitHub Actions, there is 

 to share actions, which conveniently there is a 

. To use it, just specify the action and give it your SSH secret key and WP-Engine environment name.

Note that you can store the SSH secret key in the GitHub organization or repo's 

 so it does not appear in the workflow as plaintext.

Now you have a completed workflow that will build and deploy to WP-Engine. As an added bonus, this workflow can be extended for pushing feature branches to staging as well.

Replacing Jenkins with GitHub Actions

We are experts are specifying, designing and implementing the hosting setup your website, app or database needs. 

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An update on the current WordPress situation

Replacing Jenkins with GitHub Actions