Thanks to those who have been testing the pre-release builds of WP2Static Version 7. There’s been some great detection of bugs that help justify taking a cautious approach to V7 before pushing an official release up to wp.org.
Already, there have been some great user-contributed fixes and improvements. There’s even great progress on a new GitHub deployment add-on coming from one of the community, an exciting first for WP2Static!
Centralized Add-ons Page
As part of making it an easier path for developers in the community to build their own WP2Static Add-ons, I’ve spent some time this week reimagining how Add-ons integrate with the core WP2Static plugin.
The above shows a new WP2Static > Add-ons screen, where all official and 3rd party Add-ons will appear. This simplifies knowing which add-ons are going to affect your workflow, with the ability to Enable/Disable them from a centralized location vs having to activate/deactivate the whole plugin. Behind the scenes, it should now allow us to avoid having 2 deployment add-ons running simulataneously.
I can see this turning into more, with a browsable Add-ons “marketplace” within WP2Static.
Multiple deploy configs (staging/production)
Some users, myself included, have expressed the desire to to configure both a staging and production deployment within WP2Static, without having to change options between deployments. I de-scoped this from the V7.0 roadmap a while back due to the complexity and changes required, but now I can see an easier possible solution.
Matt Vanderpol @bookwyrm has come up with an elegant solution to manage the DeployCache for multiple deployment add-ons. As soon as this is merged in, this will allow for having your staging and production deploys on different deployment add-ons.
This makes me ponder a hacky solution that should allow for 2 x the same deployment options (ie, 2 x Netlify or 2 x Cloudflare deployment configs), copying one of the add-ons and renaming it in a few places, ie wp2static-addon-cloudflare becomes wp2static-addon-cloudflare-staging. It’s not elegant, but it should work and allow for some easier workflow setups for those requiring staging/production deploys.
Boilerplate Add-on plugin for developers
By “developers” here, I mean anyone who wants to extend WP2Static. We’ve had some early success with users extending the URL detection and Post Processing phases of the WP2Static V7 workflow by adding a custom function to their (child) theme’s functions.php or combining with other commands when running via WP-CLI.
This has either been on their own initiative or with some chats with me over email/Telegram/forum. The aim with this boilerplate plugin, is to populate it with working examples of all the ways to extend WP2Static and moving those conversations to a more accessible place. It currently builds, installs and runs, logging info into WP2Static > Logs.
I’ll be using this myself when I start a new Add-on, whether for extending crawling, URL detection, post processing or deployment. Until now, I’ve been copy pasting whichever Add-on I was last working on or most similar to the new one, so this will also benefit me as much as others extending WP2Static.
x230$ wp wp2static boilerplate options list
+-------------------+--------------+
| name | value |
+-------------------+--------------+
| aRegularOption | Ohai there |
| anEncryptedOption | youcantseeme |
+-------------------+--------------+
You can follow the WP2Static/wp2static-addon-boilerplate repo on GitHub and feel free to contribute code or create Issues there when you need an example of how to do something not covered already.