Boston Wordcamp 2014 – Takeaways

WordPress migrations? Challenge accepted!

By Daniel Kanchev

I finally understood why sometimes when I migrate websites using commercial themes some of the parameters do not migrate. The problems comes from PHP serializing. During migration what I usually do is open the SQL backup in my text editor and search/replace the old/new domaine. But for themes and plugins that use PHP Serialization to store data that’s not good enough because serialization also store strings length. So when you change the domaine name, the string length change and the way PHP Serialization works is that if the string length doesn’t match the string it simply ignores it.

The solution proposed by Daniel : Use WP-CLI that will perform search/replace while fixing Serialization issues.

TTL is not good enough because some providers may override the TTL so despite good planning/timing with the TTL some users may still be redirected to the old website. So on any website where users are generating content (post/orders/etc.) you should either use remote mysql so the old server use the new server’s DB or use IP tables on the old server to redirect to the new server’s IP address.

WordPress & APIs

By Sam Hotchkiss

Nothing really new especially since sam’s talk was an emergency talk as the original speaker was sick. However I really enjoyed on his slides that summarize pretty well where we are at with APIs : “The idea of controlling the presentation of your data is dying”.

Finding the speed bumps in your code

By Matthew Boynes

Transient cache & hot to use efficiently the debug bar.

And a lot more

Wordcamps are awesome…but you can’t assist to all the great presentations. So also watched a lot of other presentations during the following days.

The full playlist is here : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhi9u-zgVSX5qEKrl8vqIcNxFYuF5LpfC