Composable WordPress
Presented by Chris Reynolds
April 8, 2025, 11:00am NY/DC/Atlanta on the Post Status WP Speakers Virtual Stage
(Find your local time here.)
View on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NOLvnYxNKE
What’s the best way of managing updates in WordPress? Is it running updates in the admin locally and pushing your changes to your site? Is it committing wp-content to your Git repository and letting WordPress core updates run normally? What happens when you’re using plugins from the WordPress.org repository and how do you manage those updates? And what happens when one of those plugins causes your site to white screen? How do you safely manage updates without risking breaking your site?
This talk will be an introduction to the Composer package manager for PHP and using it to manage your plugin and theme dependencies (and WordPress core itself). We’ll talk about the Roots Bedrock project and you’ll get to see a live demo of a Composer setup process in action!
Chris is a Developer Advocate at Pantheon. Previously, Chris has worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Pantheon (working on their integrations and open source software around WordPress), has worked in WordPress agency settings as a Senior Engineer at Human Made and Developer Lead for WebDevStudios, has been an author of online training videos for Pluralsight, a developer, project manager and support technician at Event Espresso, a WordPress freelancer, and a Specialty Team member at Whole Foods. Though vegan, they can still be snobby about cheese and chocolate. Chris maintains a number of open source plugins and projects on GitHub and WordPress.org and has been involved in their local WordCamp and WordPress user group in Salt Lake City since 2011.
When not coding, they can most likely be found planning for their next Dungeons & Dragons session.
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