The StartUp Agency - A Case Study on CFPB

Today’s agenda
 A little background
 WordPress at CFPB
 Behavior-driven WordPress development
 View-source, the WordPress way!
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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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 Standard content types
 Good CM interface
 Distributed editorial
workflow
 Custom app development
 Highly interactive or
database-driven
 Infrequent content
updates
CMS vs. Framework?
12

More people
doing
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
15

That’s how we’re thinking about WordPress…
…but how are we using it?
16

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.
19

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!

Okay, so you can teach a computer to log in…
23
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)

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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 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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 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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The StartUp Agency - A Case Study on CFPB

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