How to manage multiple wordpress project with shared code base

Question

I need to build several highly customized WordPress instances beyond look and feel changes. For example, in one of the instances, any categories with children need to display in its own dropdown on the post edit page. I can not use multi-site setup as each instances may need to be highly customized.

I would also like to have these individual projects to share the same base code, i.e. standard WordPress installation with some shared logic like security patches, caching, and so on.

Currently, I have the following layout in my source control:

root
    +---wordpress_base
    +---project1
    +---project2

wordpress_base contains the wordpress source tree. project1 and project2 contains only the files that are changed for customization. During deployment, my ant script will combine wordpress_base with the custom code from a specific project.

Is this a good way to manage mutliple WordPress source code? I have no expertise in php/wordpress development. Feel free to let me know what I am doing is stupid and suggest the right approach.

Answer 1

As mentioned before, never, ever, modify wordpress core files. It is a maintenance nightmare and a security risk, and very, very bad practice.

During development the only area you need concern yourself with is the wp-content folder, specifically plugins and themes. Put post type registrations, url rewrites, custom taxonomies etc in a plugin, and visuals in themes.

Assuming you have svn or git as your version control, I would give wordpress_base its own repository. Then give each project a repo, containing the project folder, and an SVN External/Git submodule, that pulls in the base wordpress theme.

This way each project has its own repository, and its own history, but all share the wordpress_base folder, which is tracked separately and automatically pulled in via version control.

Also have you considered wordpress child themes instead of your Ant script?

Also if you're working with Git, you can add an autodeployment script that puts a copy of the repos latest files from a branch in your live folder when you push commits to that branch on to the server.

Answer 2

My suggestion would be to do all your customization through custom Themes and Plugins. You should never modify any of the core files, as this will make future auto-updates break your site (and is a bad practice in general).

So you can keep your themes and plugins in SVN, and each site will just be a custom combination of theme + plugin.