Process

is king

Love your process

• Having a solid process for everything you do is the foundation for a successful project. 
• Everyone on your team needs to be on board with the processes for them to work. 
• Every team works differently, find something that works for you. 

What should I have a process for?

• Managing tasks and bugs
• Where, and how you develop
• Quality Assurance
• Deployments
• Ongoing Maintenance

Developing with small teams

• Jumping around on projects is inevitable.
• Code should not be "owned" by the person who wrote it. 
• Consistency is key. 
• Use a style guide.
• Document ALL THE THINGS. 

"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live"
- Martin Golding

Testing & deployments

• The days of editing code directly on the production server have come to an end.
• Use version control whenever possible.
• Push your code to a staging server first to test changes and to get stakeholder approval. 

Deployment

Local Environment

Staging

Live

GIT

Dealing with Plugins

• Have a curated list of pre-approved plugins for your team to refer to when in need of special functionality. 
• Build your own plugins for internal use.
• Leave plugins out of your repo if you can.

Quality assurance

• Requires fresh eyes.
• Checklists make life easier.
• Identify common problem areas with previous projects and make sure to check them moving forward.
• Decide on browser support before starting a project.

Sharpen your tools

Tools

• The tools you use are just the vehicle in which you execute your processes. 
• Don't fall for all the hype, use what works for you. 
• There's so many tools out there, do your research and find something that fits your needs.

IT STARTS WITH YOUR BOILERPLATE

• If the first thing you're doing is writing a doctype, you might be _doing_it_wrong();
• Using a boilerplate can help you start farther along in your development process, and will also help enforce your coding style and patterns. 
• There are tons of great options out there, and if you can't find one that's a good fit for you, build your own!

Internal Plugins

• Micro plugins FTW!
• Add functionality to your site easily without bloating your site. 
• Gives you more control over your codebase. 
• Allows you to globally update code on all of your websites.
• Tools that can help manage them: TGM plugin activation, GitHub Updater

Meet your newest employee: Automation

• Automating mundane tasks is a great way to speed up your workflow.
• What should I automate?
• Gulp or Grunt is a great place to start. 

Keep tabs on your sites

• Your sites need to be nurtured once they are out in the wild!
• Keeping sites up to date will make your life easier. 
• Consider a service such as manageWP, WPRemote, or infiniteWP to help you out.