Slides for "Working as an Out of House Developer, or Maintaining Retainers" talk given at WordCamp Tampa 2015

1. Working as an Out-of-House Developer, or
Maintaining Retainers
WordCamp Tampa 2015 - Devin Vinson

2. @devinvinson
(I mostly retweet and follow so you’ve been warned)
Devin Vinson
✦ Developer at Awesome Motive
✦ Maintain the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate
✦ Easily excited

3. Baseline Expectations
1. Be there when they need you
2. Track your time
3. Don’t break things
Paying in advance to:

4. Now add WordPress
because why else would we be here right?

5. Update all the things
(without breaking anything)
Local Development + Version Control = Good

6. Options for local
• VVV (Varying Vagrant Vagrants)
• DesktopServer
• MAMP
• VIP Quickstart (sort of)
• Salty WordPress

7. Version Control (Git)
• http://beanstalkapp.com
• https://github.com
• https://bitbucket.org
• Managed hosting with built in version control

8. Workflow
1. Update locally
2. Test
3. Commit changes with git
4. Push up those changes to your live server
5. Login on live
6. Test again

9. Celebrate
Hopefully

10. https://make.wordpress.org/core
Core changes
shouldn’t be a
surprise

11. Plugin updates
Read the changelog, look at changes in version control (git)

12. Develop new code the
same way you update
Pretend you didn’t write the new code, test it

13. Write better comments
//because metabox outputs this
array dumb
//array of arrays, only get then use the
first one

14. Make feature plugins
Add features and client requests as plugins to help
compartmentalize projects

15. Some Examples
• Button added to tinymce to add drop caps to
paragraphs, special text or code snippets
• Best-of plugin that uses google analytics data to
auto-curate posts
• Custom welcome dashboard specific to client

16. Keeping up with the
industry
When the client drops those buzzwords, be ready

17. Post Status Club
The best and easiest way to keep up with daily
WordPress happenings

18. Pro Plugin Directory
https://proplugindirectory.com/

19. I don’t know
• I haven’t had a chance to work
with that yet
• Doesn’t sound familiar, where
did you hear of that?
• I always love to check out the
newest thing but I’ll need to
look at it to make sure its been
battle tested

20. –Everyone at some point
“I can put together a quote for that.”

21. Build the relationship
From one project to the next

22. Day to Day
• Test and build new things locally
• Use Git to version your clients site (theme+plugins)
• Keep track of changes in the industry
• Enjoy working together with your client to keep
things running