[wp-hackers] Two new, long-overdue plugins to make your wordpress life a little easier...

[Mike Bijon]

Marcus, your plugin may make relative URLs workable and it's polished (plus,
your code is about as clean & short as it could be for this). However, I
think Otto's points about why core should stick with absolute URLs are
solid. Non-tech users can rely on core this way, and anyone with the
expertise to setup one or more staging servers should stick with the plugin
method (one main reason why plugins are there anyway).

Personally, I think a more-graceful way to handle absolute URLs and multiple
servers is Crowd Favorite's RAMP plugin. It uses a one-time, on-deploy
script. That's similar to what my Capistrano deploy-scripts do, and exactly
what TeamSite does.

My experience with enterprise platforms (I've run both StoryServer and
TeamSite-based orgs) is that they require a huge amount of DNS & config
juggling. Far more than setting-up absolute URLs for a WordPress staging
server. Even with the right DNS, using strictly relative URLs is still a
major hassle and requires pre-deploy audits or alert-scripts.

On both platforms I've worked on this was because there are usually
subdomains/IPs for static pages, subdomains/IPs for dynamic content (Java,
3rd-party licensed DBs/APIs, etc), some resources requiring server-server
authentication, and still other subdomains/IPs for assets and CDN content.
In general, it's near-impossible to access the staging versions of all
necessary resources without a VPN to the staging environment (which would
also solve your problem of accessing a staging server from home).

-- 

Mike Bijon
email: mike at etchsoftware.com
web: Etch Software - Web Mechanics <http://www.etchsoftware.com>
phone: (310) 625-4702

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" -Alexander Pope