Draghi: Anyone who’s ever supported any big site or web app knows this

Aldredge: You never never have manual go-live or move to production

Premo: It’s a recipe for disaster

Mirchandani: You always have dev/test/production at a minimum

Laforest: It shouldn’t even have to be explained at this late date!

Gaibler: Really not the place to discuss such stuff

Harbert: The question is: is WP a hobbyist tool or is it a real tool for serious sites? If the latter, it should support real production workflows.

Ciotta: Including regression testing, automated move to production, etc.

Olivera: I’d suggest that the amount of sites that use WordPress, in both enterprise use and ‘hobby’ use should tell you

Ulrick: Sure, but based on this absolute URL stuff, it doesn’t seem as if the developers understand serious production workflows

Dewhirst: Again, let’s really not get into this. If your automated work flow, as you claim, to be the professional way, cannot account for fixing URLs, that’s just really not all it’s cut out to be is it?

Mars: I think you overestimate how much traction ‘serious production workflows’ have globally – i mean sure there’s a lot of agreement that automated deployment is great, but it’s still relatively new

Krishna: And if whatever workflow you are using can account for it, then what’s there to discuss?

Mars: Like, you can do arbitary things during deployment using tools

Brezinski: It can change all the URLs, but the more things you have to do in an automated move, the more chance for errors

Pluck: WordPress is a software designed to work for everyone. If you’re fixated as a developer on how it should work, that is one perception that the entire team must consider amongst thousands more.

Mars: But the infrastructure side is evolving faster than apps are adjusting to work with that

Hemerly: If I can do my manual moves without errors, I’m surprised your automated moves have real problems. Might I say that one of the biggest tech site in asia, runs on WordPress and seriously it works pretty well? I’ll ask the guy behind it what his workflow is tonight

Catapano: Fujihara: cool, thanks

Gieringer: Fujihara: actually I haven’t started developing a site. I’m just looking into it. And being opinionated and probably annoying.

Mars: I also think people underestimate the work involved in managing automated deployment platforms – sure, the tech is awesome but manual deployment is still gonna be used in a lot of business situations for a long time

Waltemath: Everyday someone comes in and decides WordPress‘s core is stupid or that the people working behind it didn’t think of things. There are thousands of developers working on it, usually led by people who are in leading positions in the PHP / Web / whatever floats your boat industry. Automattic, a pretty big company puts developers on it free time

Fleshman: And let’s be honest, like what Mars said: all these talk of automation are still mostly talks. Before I started my firm, I worked in Asia’s biggest if not one of the biggest IT Firm. Guess how they move files? cp. With a infrastructure guy who needs to check up what the parameters are before he gets the copying done.

Stecher: Mars: if you can make your deployment simple, then it’s easy to automate. and if it’s automated, you are not likely to end up making errors that cause a lot of trouble

Taddei: Fujihara: just because they’re big doesn’t mean they do it properly!

Obrecht: And what is properly? For 20 years manual changes are what happened, and in the last 2 years, things pick up and everyone is expected to drop all they do and work on what others define as ‘proper’? Give me a break!

Tevada: Some large companies who do huge websites like the one i worked in don’t even have version control

Voelkerding: Those large companies without version control are crazy

Fiesel: Just because you know how to use the latest tools don’t make you professional. Not you but saying everyone

Stohl: These companies have policies and operations in place of course manual to make sure things go well