craft setup 
So that was three days or so of looking into best practices for spinning up Craft CMS on both a local development environment and on a (link: https://www.digitalocean.com/ text: Digital Ocean) droplet, which meant working through error messages and doing things twice to really learn it. I wound up using (link: https://puphpet.com/ text: PuPHPeT) to configure (link: https://www.vagrantup.com/ text: Vagrant) on my Mac laptop (and then my iMac), hosted the repo on (link: https://bitbucket.org text: Bitbucket), and deployed it with (link: http://deploybot.com/ text: Deploybot) onto a LAMP (Ubuntu 14) droplet. SSH keys and Apache config and mySQL setup (three times) was a chore, for sure. Also, I set up a dev.*PROJECT*.maxfenton.com domain for the droplet. After working through that for a staging server, I got concerned about hosting a production (or even that staging) server with a limited understanding of security, firewalls, IP tables, etc — plus nginx, etc. so I spent trying out Server Pilot as a setup and maintenance tool for the droplet itself. At its simplest, that would entail making a new Ubuntu (not LAMP) droplet, giving Server Pilot access, and letting it go, but it defaults to an */public* root, whereas the LAMP and Vagrant setups I had made used a */html* root directory. So I spun wheels learning where and how to adjust apache-sp, nginx-sp, and php-fpm configuration to change the `root` directory. A good learning experience. (hint: don't forget */etc/phpX.Y-sp/fpm-pools.d* ) So now, as of EOD Friday, I have... four basic empty Craft CMS installations: two on Digital Ocean, one on my laptop, and one on my desktop. I haven't worked through any kind of database migration/sync automation, but ok. ### Good references: - - - - - ### Next week: - content model - templates - learning Twig. ### *Affiliate/referral links if you want them:* - [Server Pilot](https://www.serverpilot.io/?refcode=7ea01fce111e) - [Digital Ocean](https://m.do.co/c/88805c6e422c)
new year 

Planning work on a new project through April and wrap-up on one or two others. Will try to remark here about what I learn on those, as that seems like a good thing to do.

Topics for the former: Craft CMS, Vagrant, Homestead, contracts, prototyping, content modeling, some clever AJAX search and filtering interactions. Digital Ocean and Deploybot. And who knows what else.

Topics for the latter: Wordpress updates, defacto sysadmin stuff, Ultimate Member, Wordpress actions and filters, working together, delegation. Stuff like that.

I dunno. 2016. Feels like the future. Missing some people. Gaining some others. Not doing a great job of making room for all the ones we already have.