Golden Minds Developer Processes

Environments

  • Staging – staging.goldenminds.edu.ph
  • Production – goldenminds.edu.ph, www.goldenminds.edu.ph

Staging is where you test your changes, play around and ask for approval for any code changes.
Production is our live website. Only approved changes in staging should be made to production.
Code changes – any changes made to the theme files (.css, .php)

Our development process

  • Make changes to staging
  • Ask approval from Sir Derek, or Team Lead
  • Make changes to prod

Maintenance mode

Turn On maintenance mode

Go to Maintenance page. To set the website maintenance mode on/off. Admins can see the actual site. Others will see a maintenance page.

Backups

The backup software UpdraftPlus is creating a backup every day and will retain 14 days worth of backups. It backups everything, db, uploads, files, to a secure Google Drive location.

You can restore a particular backup inside the Admin dashboard and click UpdraftPlus on the sidebar. UpdraftPlus > Backup/Restore.

  • staging – manual backup
  • production – automatic backups 14 days worth of data

Security Reminders

Development

For any code changes (theme code changes or any .php files):
DO NOT MAKE CHANGES DIRECTLY TO PRODUCTION.

Start your development locally or on staging server. (staging.goldenminds.edu.ph).
The purpose of the staging server is to test out changes and making changes to be reviewed by Sir Derek or any team lead.
It’s a place where you can play around without having to mess up production.

Once the changes are approved, apply the changes to live (Production) www.goldenminds.edu.ph

Plugins

WordPress plugins allows us to add features to the website with less work. But it’s also a
gateway for hackers using unmaintained plugins.

Minimize the amount of plugins to be installed. If its not important, do not install it.

Plugins also break when WordPress upgrades its version. So its added work on our part to maintain.

Keep plugins to a minimum.

Updates

Always keep WordPress and plugins updated to the latest version.
Start the update on STAGING before doing updates on PRODUCTION. This will
ensure that we dont break production when a breaking change gets released.

CSS

We use tailwindcss for CSS framework. It’s like bootstrap. So you don’t have to
create your own css classes. https://tailwindcss.com/

Update carousel

If you want to change the images in the carousel. Go to Appearance > Customize > Site Identity and select image for Carousel Image 1-4.

Create an announcement

Only one announcement will be shown on the front page at a time. Only the latest one will show.

Go to post page (Posts > Add Post) or direct link:

Set the category as Announcement.

Create a News Post

Go to post page (Posts > Add Post) or direct link:

Set the category as News.

Create an event

Event shows a calendar of events.

To manage events, go to events page.