We’ve seen this story over and over. Your client’s marketing agency wants you to do something… or you need to talk to them about a problem they are causing, and there is this gap where you don’t know how to get through to them. I’ve been on both sides of this fence. I’d like to help you close the gap with your clients or internally within your organization. We’ll discuss how to build trust, communicate effectively, and follow-through in a way that closes the gap of understanding between marketing and development. Don’t get stuck in games of politics when solid, clear, concise communication will do! Improve your marketing know-how and impress your clients and higher-ups too.

This presentation will discuss how we use Docker to improve our development and deployment of WordPress sites. The presentation describes how themes and plugins can be developed locally and then packaged into a Docker container. A Jenkins pipeline is used with Git to automatically run a build and deploy the new WordPress container onto a test server where automated Selenium scripts are executed. Based on the results of the tests the container is tagged as a production candidate. A deployment pipeline is then used to execute a Blue-Green deployment on the latest update to production. Once the deployment is proven to work through automated testing the router is switched to the new deployment. The overall process helps reduce the risk of production updates to WordPress, themes, and plugins as well as reduce security concerns caused by randomly installing plugins by users. The presentation will also discuss strategies for running a WordPress database both outside and inside of a Docker container. It will discuss the pros and cons of each approach.