I’m Speaking at the WordPress London Meetup – Jan 25th, 2018

It is great to be back in the office after a relaxing weekend at home. This week I’m heading over to City, University of London to speak at the first #WPLDN meetup of the year on January 25th. I’ve been looking forward to this for a few days now and will be talking about how to use a Continuous Integration(CI) tools like Codeship to deploy code to WP Engine (or any other host that supports Git).

CI tools allow developers to have more control of what happens after code is successfully pushed to a repository. During the deployment process, additional steps may be necessary to build files from source, minify scripts, pull in other necessary files, cleanup extraneous code and a whole host of other common tasks that can automate what would otherwise be repetitive manual processes. Using a CI tool also allows you to have a consistent process which is not prone to variation or change, which essentially eliminates the chance of human error.

Another benefit of CI for deployment is that code can be pushed frequently while being fully tested before integrating with a working codebase. Using this method many developers can collaborate and do not have to worry about breaking each other’s code each time they commit. Testing can be done on separate tiers in order to verify that code is fully functional and there are no pre-show glitches before pushing the final code to production.

As you can imagine, CI goes quite deep and this post just begins to scratch the surface of what can be done with CI. There are may other benefits of using CI as part of your deployment process with WordPress. I’ll be diving in to how CI can improve your workflow and will show an example deployment which includes dependency management, multiple branches and automated build tools along with automated testing.

This will be a technical talk and I explain in a way that everyone can understand the concepts and benefits of using CI as an important part of a development and deployment workflow.