Building for Agility: Lessons from Bloomberg LP

This month's meetup will have a little something for everyone... from beginners to developers to system administrators. Read on!

MAIN PRESENTATION

Can WordPress be a secure, reliable platform for more of your web needs than just blogging? It is at Bloomberg where it is used for hosting 35+ sites ranging from media publishing to interactive marketing to brochure-ware micro-sites, all on a single multisite instance. In such a diverse multi-purpose environment, the challenge is not building each individual site, but rather creating a platform that allows for the rapid development and deployment of new sites and provides complete flexibility in the design & functionality of sites while ensuring reliability, maintainability, and availability.

In this session we will discuss:

Adapting WordPress extensibility mechanisms for non-blogging uses. Hosting blogs with both sub-domain and sub-directory based URL schemes on a single WordPress instance. Managing site inter-dependencies to minimize error spillover. Testing methodologies. Baking security into your cluster architecture. OPENING PRESENTATION: "WordPress Helpers" Plugin

Don't you wish WordPress had a few more settings to help you tailor your site to your needs? We all do. Until now we had to search for code snippets or install multiple plugins to get WordPress just right. Well not anymore!

Steve Bruner will be demonstrating how just one plugin can do it all. The "WordPress Helpers" plugin is the missing settings page for WordPress, and let's you easily:

Set your excerpt length in Words or Characters. Increase the height of the Excerpt box. Remove some (or all) of the WordPress default widgets. Get rid of Jabber, AIM or Yahoo IM in the user profile fields. Disable RSS feeds. Remove the WordPress toolbar or just some of it's components. Change "Howdy" and much, much more! *WordPress Helpers will be available at WordPress.org before the meetup starts.

About the Speakers:

Rory Murphy oversees Bloomberg’s enterprise WordPress infrastructure. With 35+ sites and counting, major focus areas include designing for maintainability, secure architectures, performance tuning, and configuration management. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional, and a proud alumnus of the University of Notre Dame.

Steve Bruner is the organizer of the WordPress NYC Meetup, CEO of SlipFire LLC (http://slipfire.com/); a WordPress development shop, and Partner at Piklist LLC (http://piklist.com/); a company building the most powerful WordPress framework available: Piklist (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/piklist/).