Tag: server administration

Moving on up

If you’re reading this post, then you’re seeing a brand new danielbachhhuber.com hosted by Digital Ocean. I’ve been a long-time WebFaction user, but the allure of cheap SSD was too much to pass up.  That, lack of two-factor auth support, and generally feeling like WebFaction is stuck in the early 2000’s caused me to branch out.

And I’ve been incredibly impressed. The machine is fast (although I guess I’m jinxing myself now), the control panel is just what I want it to be, and the price make me feel like I’m committing a robbery.

For anyone that wants to take a peek at what I’ve done, the repo is in Github. It was intended to be a one-day project, but I ran into some domain-mapping hell. As it turns out, core doesn’t fully support domain mapping as I thought it did.

Lastly, I provisioned my new machine using masterless Salty WordPress (work in progress). Hoping to align incentives such that Salty WordPress continues to be the best way to provision local and production WordPress machines.

#wcbos: Entreprise WordPress Do’s and Don’ts

What does enterprise mean? In the context of the WordPress presentation: sites on a large scale. Sites with a lot of traffic, content, and that require high availability.

WordPress evolution from an enterprise perspective:

  • 2.3 – Introduction of custom taxonomies
  • 2.9 – Introduction of custom post types; WordPress matures to a real CMS
  • 3.1 – Network admin and expanded queries
  • 3.2 – Modernization and performance improvements

Conde Nast started migrating a lot of sites from Movable Type to WordPress in 2008-2009, and the total number has only been growing.

Guidelines for using WordPress in enterprise

Hosting infrastructure do’s:

  • Carefully examine your site’s requirements and evaluate service offerings before deciding on a host
  • Give yourself at least 2 weeks for new WordPress VIP setups
    • This lead time requirement can sometimes be a deterrent for clients that want to get a project live on a quick turnaround
  • Give yourself additional time for VIP code and plugin reviews. Plugins that aren’t already in their set of accepted set can take a while
  • Leverage AMI’s for sites on Amazon Web Services
  • Use multiple regions for failover on Amazon Web Services
  • Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Hosting don’t: Host multiple high-trafficked sites on the same hardware

Migration do’s:

  • Transfer your SEO juice using 301 redirects
  • Minimize the need for a double-publishing scenario

Migration don’t: Forget your image assets.

Neat trick: If you don’t know whether all of your image assets were copied over, write a script to tail Apache/Nginx request log, watch for 404s, and pull the image over from the old environment if the request 404’s.

Development do’s:

Development don’ts:

  • Modify WordPress core
  • Write your own SQL queries unless absolutely necessary
  • Forget about your admin users — use contextual help and train them

Launch do’s:

  • Lower DNS TTL settings before launch (if updating DNS address)
  • Apply appropriate CDN exceptions for wp-admin pages
  • Remove your robots.txt file to make the site visible to search engines
  • Verify server permissions on files and directories
  • Set up an automated deployment process

Launch don’t: Keep .htaccess writable

Resources on hardening WordPress

Status

After a few months of punting, I finally configured Sphinx search on our dev box this afternoon. All in all, it took two hours to install, configure, and add to our tech WordPress theme. Here are my original notes if you want to try; if you install with a package manager, the greatest difficulty is understanding how to tune it and integrate into WordPress search. Next steps: refine search interface/experience, configure usage monitoring, add to corpus of data, rinse and repeat. Just think of how much more empowered educators would be if they had access to student search treads.