Don’t Mess Up Prod

I created a simple WordPress plugin called Don’t Mess Up Prod, which adds a little environment indicator to your admin bar. If you flip around between multiple environments (local, dev, staging, prod), you might find it useful. It has definitely saved me a few headaches.

This was also partly an exercise in releasing a plugin on wordpress.org for the first time in 20 years. I found the process a bit easier in than expected, but it also helped to be using the right tools.

One of those tools was the WordPress Coding Standards. The rules are opinionated but leave a distinct code smell. They’re also being enforced in the code review process now. I had already applied my own ruleset to the project, so it made things fairly straight-forward.

The other tool that saved a ton of time was 10up’s plugin deploy actions. They make it super simple to tag a release and have it automagically get bundled up and submitted to the plugin repository. It saved a ton of time trying to faff about with SVN. There’s also an action for simple documentation changes.

It was also an excuse to explore implementing testing, something there often isn’t budget for on client projects. Have some basic Cypress tests running, but was less successful with phpunit.

Full codebase is on Github → dont-mess-up-prod.