Wordpress for Cloud

I am bored. I have decided to code for Wordpress but instead of using the regular code base I am going to write a fork which is AWS specific or rather cloud specific API like Ceph Object storage API if possible. You could theoretically  re use the code base from AWS S3 on to other platforms like DreamObjects etc. There are a few wordpress plugins around that copy your images and files to S3 and do basic CDN. But they are inadequate and buggy. For e.g. on www.GamingIO.com I am using a plugin for pushing to S3 but there are files locally and it defeats the purpose. Not to mention that due to a bug the image resize functionality in Wordpress seems to create several duplicate copies of each image. I had to delete all the images to make space on the site and recovered 50% of it. I got a few broken links for all the trouble. But it was free plugin…what did I expect.

When I was digging through Wordpress I noticed how much database it uses. Every post has a version and it all goes to DB. This is great for small sites not looking at more than 200 posts in it’s lifetime. Not so much for news publishing where we had 3 people doing 6-9 posts a day with several revisions. That crapped the database. With Application accelerators like Akamai, Cloudflare or even Cloudfront it isn’t so hard to reduce Disk IO on the images but Database is the one thing that kills it all. This is where S3 can be useful. It’s what I want to start with.

My setup.

So far…I have looked at the awesome guide for wannabe Wordpress Developers here . Since I am familiar with Wordpress and have played with a bit I went ahead with setting up my dev. I chose to go with Turnkey Wordpress even though I hate that they have all these API keys etc to link their VM to their “Cloud”. Not to mention for a development environment it lacks any repository management tools to be able to merge and update code. Seems like it wasn’t necessary but well…

Back to square one I decided to check out code on to my dev machine which has a ready LAMP setup. Did a simple,

svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/

An edit of config file, populate test DB  and it’s all good. I could load the wordpress just fine.

Since the dev machine is connected via Samba to my regular Windows do-it-all desktop I can access the files and load it in my editor. Normally I use Notepad++ since it doesn’t crap my directory structure but this time I am going with Eclipse. Yes I am solid broke after attending Black Hat Asia 2015 (more on that in another post). Even if I had cash to spare I would prioritize my PyCharm License.

Forward.

It might be difficult to change the wordpress core and keep up with nightly builds. I might just end up with the Plugin but hopefully it won’t be a disaster.