WP Git Updater
Automated Source Controlled WordPress Updates
So today we released another ecosystem product for WP Git Updater. Its called WPDock and is a simple way to develop for WordPress locally using docker.
WPDock is open source and we hope its useful in those cases running some of the other development tools is overkill, or not quite whats needed.
https://wpgitupdater.dev/blog/wp-dock-a-simple-word-press-development-environment-using-docker
Super excited! We have just published our release post and WP Git Updater is open for business!
It's still early days but we are looking forward to any feedback from early adopters, and continuing to optimise and improve the features.
We have a great discount we are offering until the end of February for any early adopters too!
Checkout our launch post: https://wpgitupdater.dev/blog/and-were-live
We have had our first supporting plugin added to the WordPress.org plugins marketplace!
We have a few plugin ideas and this one was obvious and also lacking choice when browsing the market place.
Its a free plugin and theres no implication to try our service by using it. We just hope its useful and gets our brand in front of the people using Git Source Control to manage their WordPress websites.
Checkout our blog post on the approval: https://wpgitupdater.dev/blog/our-display-git-status-plugin-as-just-been-approved-on-the-word-press-org-plugin-marketplace
A major feature we felt was needed for our launch was automated theme updates to compliment the existing plugin update feature. We have made sure this feature works seamlessly and will now be included in v1 of the WP Git Updater tool!
Its also given us some great content to start building our blog section up: https://wpgitupdater.dev/blog/wp-git-updater-now-supports-theme-updates.
It's taken some time but we now have a website!
During these two weeks we have still been reviewing updates, making enhancements, it really is almost effortless for us now.
The main focus has been on some solid documentation for the tool along with the website. We anticipate the audience is going to be like minded, so the documentation has been curated with this in mind.
Were still not quite ready for a launch so any feedback on the documentation style will be greatly received.
For the website we have been back with our faithful friend Laravel, Spark and Nova in the background. It really makes bootstrapping a subscription based site soo much easier giving us more headspace for things that matter over subscription webhook's and automating free trial expiries.
So with the initial documentation ready, a few blog posts ready and a neat homepage explaining the tool were ready and waiting for the new year.
Until then we hope you will consider subscribing to our mailing list which we plan on keeping updated with progress.
We believe the tool, website, api and subscriptions are ready but for maximum effect we want to add a few more features over the holiday period ready for an early 2021 Launch!
We are rigorously testing every day to ensure is a seamless launch process.
In short, it definately works and is super useful!
Regardless of its success or failure as a saas product this tool works really well for our day to day operations. And it saves us soo much time.
Something we didn't consider initially is this is not only faster for us to perform update management on sites, but it also makes us more proactive with the task. Now reviewing updates is very close to 2 button clicks we can perform the updates faster and they happen more frequently for our customers.
We have decided its time to build a website and get ready for the new year. DOMAIN NAME TIME!
As a team we settled on "WP GIT Updater" as the name, and off we were to gandi for our .dev and .com domains, while our in house designer is working on a logo and brand.
With many sites to test on we built a cli tool and automated our source controlled WordPress plugin updates using Github Actions on a schedule.
The results have left us wondering why we didn't think of this before now. Each update is a small task in itself, but around 10-30 plugins per site, and 10's of sites in source control the time really adds up.
Now less code oriented team members can review plugin updates to dev sites with our automated develop branch builds, and pull requests created for us!
Along the way i've also been able to add a new language into my tool belt. Spending most of time with PHP and Javascript. It was refreshing, yet familiar to try my hand at Golang.
We chose Golang simply because we knew if this was to be something we could distribute in future it needed to be a binary we could provide that doesn't need a runtime. Leaving our goto languages on the shelf for this one.
Ive learnt so much (and re-learnt in better ways) with Golang. Most notably trying to build a distribution system, then finding the wonderful godownloader and goreleaser combination which did everything we needed.
Now we know this is viable for us, we are confident this is useful for others in our situation (and maybe even others we haven't thought of yet).
As the director of a software agency we manage and create many WordPress websites. Some of these sites require Git source control and a common task (burden) was keeping the plugins updated in a source controlled environment. So WP Git Updater was born
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