February Talk at Boston WordPress Meetup

This past February, I spoke at the Boston WordPress Meetup at the Microsoft New England Research and Development building. My talk was entitled, “Create Your Own WordPress Plugin and Theme Repository.” View the slides and code samples.

I walked attendees through how to create a rudimentary client and server infrastructure. Given the ubiquity of WordPress and the number of agencies developing WordPress websites, discussion around the workflow for deployment is surprisingly sparse. This may be due in part to the range and number of options and protocols.

I wanted to use WordPress’ own update API visible in the dashboard and compatible with the WP CLI command-line tool. That is surprisingly difficult to do, and perhaps more surprising, there is no off-the-shelf solution available. The recent drama in WordPress land—including the commandeering of an existing plugin’s slug on the official WordPress Plugin Repository—might make this need more salient. I also realize that the market for such a tool is quite small, and to many existing deployment methods, from SFTP to rsync, are more than adequate.