The Benefits of WP Engine Developer Tools
WP Engine is a leading managed hosting provider for WordPress. The company powers thousands of websites and apps built on the WordPress platform, delivering a fast, reliable and secure web experience. All levels of users, including bloggers, marketers, SMBs and large corporations, rely on WP Engine’s platform to keep their websites up and running. Founded in 2010, WP Engine is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and has offices in San Francisco, California, San Antonio, Texas, and London, England.
Development Environment and Workflow
Vagrant Environment Integration
Developing your site locally is best practice and to support this, WP Engine is working on a vagrant environment that will allow local testing that can be directly pushed to their production hosting platform. In the meantime, they offer the WP Engine Mercury Vagrant environment, or HGV, which lets you build a site locally and move that site into production without too much disruption — the site will look and behave the same way when moved from local to live.
Mercury Vagrant (HGV). The coolest feature is that you can test HHVM and PHP environments right next to each other. This is great for testing compatibility of plugins and the like with ease. HGV currently has an extremely similar stack to the software stack that WP Engine uses. The main difference is that HGV uses PHP-FPM, whereas the WP Engine stack uses Apache2 and mod_php.
Soon, you’ll have a fully compatible vagrant solution for local development with the WP Engine platform.
Collaborate and Maintain Control With Git Push
Another gap in the WordPress feature set is that it lacks built-in integration for source-code control of themes, plugins and other customization’s. WP Engine was the first managed WordPress hosting provider to allow Git integration for customized deployments.
Test and Share Your Work With Staging Sites
WordPress has always lacked a helpful staging capability. You’re often forced to make changes in live production with one hand on the mouse, while crossing your fingers with the other.
WP Engine offers built-in staging sites, and they’re free. Within your WP Engine account, you can run as many staging sites as you like for no extra cost. A staging site is an independent clone of your live production site that can be easily created to test plugins, themes, and custom code.
Develop in Production
For new sites, it’s often easiest for WordPress developers to just work in their live production environment.
Some say developing in production is really the only way to show the true environment and how it will behave in the wild — but sometimes it’s just faster, right? Plus, a live site is accessible from anywhere, giving you the ability to check it out on different devices, screen sizes, form factors, what have you, to see how it looks.
WPEngine provides password protection for any of your sites so you can develop new sites and hide them from everyone in the world but your clients and your test team. You can share the password-protected site with whomever you choose.
Backups and One-Click Restore
WPengine offers essentially Time Machine for WordPress. You can create snapshots of your live site at any time, and WP Engine will do so each day for you in the background as well. You can always revert back to any of these snapshots, whether undoing that live production change you just goofed up or going back the theme you were using from two weeks ago.
Automated Site Migration
WP Engine’s automated site migration plugin is the best solution I’ve seen for moving a WordPress site. Migrating WordPress has always been a slow, detail-oriented process and I’ve always found it a bit aggravating. I always seem to run into some small glitch, no matter how well I thought I had mastered the process.
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