WordPress Development

WordPress is used at Middlebury by a variety of individuals and groups including faculty, staff, students, administrators, designers, developers, librarians, technologists, academic and administrative departments, offices, student organizations, courses, initiatives, projects and so on. This document compiles recommendations about how Wordpress at Middlebury should be configured, updated and maintained.

Initial Setup

The initial setup of WordPress requires:

1. cloning the Midd WordPress git repository
2. editing the config.php and .htaccess files
3. copying production database

Cloning the central repository

Your ssh keys must be authorized to access the central repository. All chisel accounts' ssh keys have been authorized to do so at the time of this writing. Contact Adam to add ssh keys for other machines (such as your desktop) if desired.

1. cd to your public_html directory on chisel:

   cd ~/public_html/

2. clone the repository and create a working directory with git-clone:

   git clone git@chisel.middlebury.edu:wordpress-mu.git wordpress

3. cd into new wordpress directory

   cd wordpress

4. initialize submodules and then update:

   git submodule init

   git submodule update

Configuring WordPress

1. cd to your wordpress directory:

   cd ~/public_html/wordpress/

2. Create a local copy of your WordPress configuration

   cp wp-config.php-midd wp-config.php

3. Update local copy of WordPress configuration

   -define('DB_NAME', 'username_wordpress');

   +define('DB_NAME', 'yourname_wordpress');

   -$base'/';

   +$base'/~yourname/wordpress/';

4. Create a local copy of your .htaccess file:

   cp .htaccess-midd .htaccess

5. Update local copy of .htaccess file:

   -RewriteBase

   +RewriteBase /~yourname/wordpress/

Copying production database to development

1. Create a database, (e.g. yourname_wordpress) on development server
2. Dump the production database

   mysqldump -h snipe -u wordpress -p --lock-tables=false --skip-extended-insert wordpress > yourname_wordpress.sql

3. Re-write server specific values in SQL using perl scripts

   perl -p -i -e

   's#http://blogs.middlebury.edu#http://chisel.middlebury.edu/~yourname/wordpress#gi' yourname_wordpress.sql

   perl -p -i -e 's#blogs.middlebury.edu#chisel.middlebury.edu#gi' yourname_wordpress.sql

    perl -p -i -e

   "s#chisel\.middlebury\.edu','/#chisel.middlebury.edu','/~yourname/wordpress/#gi" yourname_wordpress.sql

4. Import updated sql into your development database

   mysql -u testuser -ptestpassword -D yourname_wordpress < yourname_wordpress.sql