WordPress Unattended Installs

As of the writing of this entry, b5media has over 90 blogs with more coming everyday it would seem. Part of my job as Systems Administrator is to automate my tasks. For instance, before a blog setup would take weeks because of all the people it had to visit before being launched. The Channel Editor would send the notice to the guys about the new blog. Duncan would register the domain and setup DNS. He would shoot me an email to have a virtual host account setup on our cluster along with a MySQL database for wordpress. I would shoot the ticket back to him and he would install WordPress. Then he would send it over to Ingrid for graphics and template design. Finally, when Ingrid was done, it would go to Darren who would take care of the advertising bit and finally back to the Channel Editor who would consult with the blogger and assist in last minute tweaks, plugins, etc.

At some point, there would be a launch and the angels in heaven would sing “Hallelujah!” and the sun would stand still in the eastern sky and out of the clouds would ride the King of Glory in a chariot…. ummm, yeah. ;)

My point is that that takes a long time and I’ve now developed an automated process that takes care of everything but the advertising and template design in about 5 second making Duncan’s job obsolete. ;) You’re fired, mate! I plan to write a post soon on the power of automation soon anyway. This is not the one for it.

However, part of the cumbersome process of maintaining so many blogs is trying to keep a common environment. There are certain configurations that we deploy out of the box for our blogs. From my experience in enterprise, I am quite familiar with the XP Unattended install where systems can be imaged with an XP image by feeding it certain options from an .ini file.

Thought I, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could get WordPress to read all of my configuration options from a file, say wp-unattended.ini?” I proposed it to a few people who are working with WordPress development and they liked the idea, but wasn’t sure it had enough juice for the core. Nevertheless, they recommended I go forward with the script and submit it. It is currently waiting for a second opinion.

But this is how it works.

First I developed a custom plugin called WP Unattended Export. This plugin is really only beneficial if you plan to deploy other blogs and you want the same stock settings on all blogs. Go through a blog “image”, set things how you want them, then use this plugin to export settings to a .ini file. You will have to copy the results from your browser into wp-unattended.ini which will look something like this.

Now, it’s time to create the script that will import settings from WP-unattended.ini. The reality is, it is very difficult to get code implemented in the WordPress core. It must be lean and mean and extremely useful. To that end, I tried to keep a low profile with the code - it’s already bad that I’m proposing adding an entirely new file. Anyways, I created automated-install.php that looks like this. Finally, I just needed to make sure the install script would check to find out if wp-unattended.ini exissted, parse it if it did and make necessary adjustments to the WordPress stock options.

I did this with this modification to the install.php.

All this changeset indicates is that two lines are added to install.php to include the automated-install.php file if wp-unattended.ini exists.

I can’t say I’ve done exhaustive testing of this process, but so far it works pretty good. This is really a great way for blog networks to consider deploying blogs.

Tagged as: Programming, Sysadmin, WordPress