Easy Content Deployment for WordPress: RAMP.

By far the most hideous part of continuous development is database migration. While we have stellar tools for source code management, the database layer seems to be just abstracted enough to be painful.

I’ve just learned of RAMP through the stream of tweets from #wcsf and I’m impressed.

RAMP does what it can to tackle the problem we never want to deal with: keeping your staged WordPress content in community with your production WordPress content.

RAMP allows you to make all the changes you need in your staging environment, then selectively push these changes to your production site. You can set up a new section of your site, upload some images to fill out a nice carousel for it, and add a link to it on your home page. Once this content has been reviewed and approved, you can go to your RAMP page, select these content changes, and push them to your production site.

Do take the time to check out their video tour, the entire process seems extremely polished from start to finish.

A quick WordPress tip regarding Custom Post Types: when giving a custom post type a name, make sure that its length is 20 characters or less, or weird things will happen.

I recently ran into this and spent way too much time trying to figure out why things weren’t working as expected. For some reason the “Publish” button on the “Add New” page for my custom post type was replaced by a “Submit for Review” button. Huh?

At first I thought the problem was related to permissions, but it turned out to be the length of the name I’d given my custom post type.
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I’m starting to get into WordPress child themes. I have a lot of themes are they are all based on one theme. Until now, I have been using Subversion to merge the changes across themes. But this is getting to be painful.

When I make a change in one theme I have to integrate all the rest and it just doesn’t happen when I’m busy. After a while some themes get totally left out and then it turns into this big production to bring them up to date. The base theme often contains plugin dependencies and so the themes that haven’t been updated can’t use my latest plugins.

Using child themes will help me so much. All I have to do is a Subversion update on the base theme when I make changes to the core functionality, which is often all I do. It will also help my organization not to have so many files that are different on purpose.

I know it sounds obvious, but you really have to have a need for child themes to become worthwhile, and now I have that need.

Installing/Updating WordPress with Subversion

After a long time of installing WordPress manually on my test machines, I have finally switched to using subversion. It is so much easier.

It wouldn’t be, except that for some reason WordPress will not update properly if your site is not on the open internet. I don’t know what their deal is with that, but this gets around it easily. If you use subversion for other things and are familiar with it, but don’t yet use it for your local WordPress installations, I highly recommend making the switch.

In the past, I’ve wanted to browse or search through my own tweets. Viewing my Twitter profile is one way to do that. But if I want to browse back through history, it’s a chore to go back very far. And forget about searching through my own tweets on Twitter since Twitter Search currently only goes back about a seven days.

I know there are a few apps or scripts that create backups and much more for you. But I wanted a database and simple UI completely within my own control. One that wouldn’t go away if the developer abandoned it. So one Saturday a few weeks ago, in a little over an hour, I had my own, free, browsable, searchable tweet archive. Now I can easily browse back to my very first tweet, or search for those quotes by Paul Rand I tweeted last year. This isn’t anything entirely new. I’m just writing it up what works for me in case it helps fit some pieces together.

How to set up your own tweet archive with WordPress

Assuming you have a collection of past tweets, the first step is to collect them in one place. TweetBackup.com provides an easy way to do this. It uses OAuth, so there’s no need to enter your username or password as long as you’re already signed into twitter.com. Give them an email address, and your tweets start backing up immediately. (See their FAQ about a possible limitation of 3200 tweets.)
Once TweetBackup is done grabbing all your tweets (it took about 2 minutes for my ~1,400 tweets), go to the Export tab, and save the RSS format to your local drive
Install a fresh copy of WordPress somewhere on your server if you don’t want tweets intermingled with other WP content. In the Tools section of WordPress, use the built-in RSS importer to import the file you saved from TweetBackup.
Assuming you want WordPress to automatically grab each tweet from this point forward, install the Twitter Tools plugin, enter your Twitter credentials in its settings screen, and configure it to create a blog post for each of your tweets. (Turn off the option to tweet when a post is created from this blog so the universe doesn’t explode in some endless loop of repeating tweets and blog posts.)
Update: I made the WP theme files for my tweet archive available for download for anyone who’d like to use them wholesale or as a base for their own archive.
That’s it.

A few extra steps, if you’re up for them

Twitter Tools will handle future tweets correctly. But the format of each tweet from TweetBackup starts with a prefix of your Twitter username, followed by a space and a colon, like this: “stop: Clicking through the new design of…”. I used the Search Regex plugin to search for and eliminate that prefix.
Past tweets from TweetBackup won’t have linked URLs. The Autolink URI plugin can do this for you automatically.
If you’re good enough with regular expressions, you can also use the Search Regex plugin to link up any @mentions and #hashtags in your tweets. I suck at regex, so I cheated and used some of the patterns from David Walsh within the Search Regex search/replace UI. Technically, you could probably use David’s first pattern to link up URLs too.
A few WP plugins can enhance the built-in search functionality of WordPress. I’m using Search Everything.
WP Super Cache will keep server resources to a minimum and help load pages quickly once they’re cached.
If you’re really up for it, you can customize the templates and design as I did. Anything is possible if you’re familiar with PHP and WordPress templates. For instance, you could try using the Similar Posts plugin to suggest possibly related tweets on the permalink page.

Now, every tweet you’ve written and will write can be duplicated and backed up in your own MYSQL database, accessible via a WordPress front end. Technically, you could probably use any blogging platform or CMS to do this. (It doesn’t require WordPress.) You’ll just need a means to import old tweets and automatically grab new tweets.

Via instantshift.com

Pulling the trigger just got easier. Now anyone can have a beautifully designed, standards-compliant WordPress site. The 60-plus recently created free WordPress themes (AKA template collections) listed by InstantShift’s Daniel Adams are categorized by function and style: “Clean and Minimal,” “Artistic and Fancy,” “Magazine Style,” “Portfolio Style,” “News and Social Media Style,” “Showcase and Galleries Style,” “E-Comerce and Shopping Cart Style,” “Domain Parking/Coming Soon Style,” and “Other.” Something for everyone.

Not everything here is a winner or will appeal to every taste, but there is plenty of great work to be had here. If WordPress is your CMS (it’s mine), even if you are a designer, you may ask yourself if you really need to perform that next site redesign from scratch.

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