Developer: Config-Driven WordPress

On Monday, September 16th, Weston Ruter, Head of WordPress Development at X-Team, will give a talk on config driven WordPress development for managing large scale WordPress implementations. Weston will share his experiences manage a team of WordPress developers that oversee the production of a large network of WordPress websites.

In Weston's own words:

"The standard pattern for configuring a server environment and its sites' themes is to define several constants, set a bunch of global variables, call a few functions, and sprinkle in a few filters into the wp-config.php and functions.php. This methodology to configure WordPress makes it burdensome to allow child themes and plugins to override settings in parent themes and for there to be environment-specific configurations across servers, from development to production. I'll talk about how we have tackled this problem for large multisite installs (e.g. dozens of radio station sites using the same parent theme) by using configuration arrays that can be merged and extended before being converted into the constants, global variables, and filters that WordPress uses at runtime. Beyond the increased consistency and convenience of a centralized configuration registry array, we'll see how using such extensible arrays allows for mixin configurations and 'step-parent' themes. We'll also see how storing all configuration in data arrays (as opposed to code) our WordPress code can be more introspective."