For a WordPress instance, maintenance on a regular basis is a must to ensure that the website stays secure and up-to-date with latest practices and features.
Updating Themes
The websites running the GFI theme (US, APAC, Europe) will now receive ongoing updates available through the WordPress administration theme panel. This workflow will allow the web development team to write new features and bug fixes, and push their code to a private repository that zips up the theme files allowing administrators to update their sites at the click of a button.
With this new continuous integration workflow, the theme will follow semantic versioning conventions to make clear whether or not the update may break backwards compatibility. The web development team will take on the work of updating themes on GFI websites as new releases are created.
Core + Plugin Updates
With WordPress, new features and fixes are always coming to the CMS that the GFI websites are built on. As a result, ongoing maintenance must be done to update each WordPress instance’s core and plugins.
This will ensure that our organization’s affiliate websites are mitigated from security risks, and have the latest features available to them.
The web development team will take on the work of ongoing maintenance across the GFI websites on a monthly schedule.
In doing this work, the web team will also take backups of the entire website before updating. With this copy of the website, the web team will test the updates in a sandbox environment first on their computers locally to ensure that the websites run as expected. Once complete, they’ll run the updates on the live sites.