the startup agency - a case study on cfpb

CFPB: The federal government’s newest startupGreg Boone, Dave Kennedy, Dan Munz

WordPress in Government

JUNE 13, 2013

Today’s agenda

A little background

WordPress at CFPB

Behavior-driven WordPress development

View-source, the WordPress way!

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A little background

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“It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street–and the mortgage won’t even carry a disclosure of that fact to the homeowner.”

Unsafe at Any RateSummer 2007

JULY 2010

JULY 2011

JULY 2012

consumerfinance.gov

Launched in February 2011 (5 months ahead of

schedule)

The Bureau’s (only!) owned digital property

Consumers are our core audience

About 900K unique pageviews/month

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WP @ CFPB

Our stack

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Standard content types

Good CM interface Distributed editorial

workflow

Custom app development

Highly interactive or database-driven

Infrequent content updates

CMS vs. Framework?

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More peopledoing

fewer things

Fewer people doing

more things

In other words

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What we’ve learned

WP is not (natively) a web application

framework

Some core capabilities are still maturing

Easy to do things right; even easier to do things

wrong

Understand how Security thinks about OSS

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Big hairy questions

Consistently structuring complex taxonomies

and data relationships

Pushing reusable code blocks into modules or

plugins

Making templating platform-agnostic

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That’s how we’re thinking about WordPress…

…but how are we using it?

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17OMG DAN SHUT UP

Behavior-driven

WordPress

developmentor: “How a little Python can go a long way for PHP”

The plugin

We needed an easier way to register:

Post types with default settings

Taxonomies with custom entry boxes

Meta boxes

Capabilities

We were doing it all in the theme; we transitioned

to a plugin with a UI.

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How to know it’ll work

Two choices:

1. Manual entry of each post type, then manual

entry of one term for each taxonomy

2. Automated behavior testing!

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Enter behave

Simple, scenario based tests…

Scenario: Get more

information about us

Given I visit the

homepage

When I click the "About

us" link

Then I should be

directed to /about/

Optionally, add an and

condition after a when or then

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…organized into simple features!

Feature: Transparency in

the Bureau

As a member of the public

I want to learn more

about this organization

So that I can understand

their work better

And a real browser

(Chrome) to perform them!

[DEMO]

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Okay, so you can teach a computer to log in…

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What about a real test?

1. Log in

2. Go to the Custom Post Type page

3. Create three post types

4. Deactivate all three

5. Re-activate all three

Total execution time: 33 seconds (with about half of that going to wp-login)

Benefits of testing

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1. You know your plugin works

2. You can spot bugs on the fly

3. Programming toward specific behaviors

4. It's way faster than doing it all by hand

5. Eventually, you write better code.

6. You always know if the feature works or not

Still learning…

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It'd be nice to not have to log in _every_ time

Writing the steps can be tricky (but it's python, so not too tricky)

view-source

the WordPress way!

We all start somewhere

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But as we go, we learn

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Building, building, building…

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Embrace the WordPress community

They’re the source for solving your problems and giving you inspiration to solve theirs…

Automattic’s Github WordPress.org Forums Themeshaper.com WordPress.org Plugin Directory Also, blogs!

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How is the CFPB “viewing source”?

Hello Underscores! Forked; becoming our new base!

WordPress goodness baked in. Miminimalistic; easily extendable. Solid framework and conventions

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How is the CFPB “viewing source”?

Talking it out with P2 A trial run for managing our internal workgroups.

Turns out blogs are great for conversations!

A child theme allows us to brand it and extend it.

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How is the CFPB “viewing source”?

Going more modular Embracing <?php get_template_part() ?>

We were already doing this, but where can we do it more?

Find a best practice and ask how are we doing that?

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