This project decouples the user-supplied parts of WordPress configuration from the defaults in wp-config.php, allowing for easily portable WP installations.

It is the configuration leg of the WordPress Boilerplate tools.

User-supplied configuration values have been extracted from the base configuration file in WordPress, wp-config.php. This allows for plugging in values for database, language, debugging, etc. on a per-environment basis.

If you're setting up a new project, I strongly recommend you to take the path of least resistance and install all WPBP tools at once. See the main site for more details at wordpressboilerplate.com.

However, if you already have an existing project, do this:

1. Download the repo and put the config folder in the root directory.
2. The (possibly) tricky part is updating your current wp-config.php to enable the aforementioned "pluggable" configuration values. Essentially, it's just a matter of manually extracting the values, require'ing the setup from config/bootstrap.php in wp-config.php and then inserting the extracted values in each <environment>.php file in config/environments.

It's common to restore a database on each of your various (test-)environments, eg. local, staging etc. However, [WordPress serves pages with embedded absolute URLs based on the absolute site URL configured in your database] docs, which is not ideal. Normally, you'd have to manually update two options in the DB on each environment to set the correct hostname.

WPBP eliminates this by overriding WP_SITEURL and WP_HOME.

config/environments/production.php is by default set up to not override the constants, deriving the URL straight from the database. If this is not what you want, you can easily do it yourself — just check development.php, for instance.

Initially, two environments are setup for you - development and production. Let's say you want to add a staging environment:

1. Duplicate an existing environment file and rename it to something else, eg. staging.php.
2. Update staging.php with your details.
3. Update config/bootstrap.php to load the staging config, given a certain condition (typically just a specific domain):

<?php
// Development
if ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']=='127.0.0.1') {
  require_once 'environments/development.php';

// Staging
} elseif ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']=='X.X.X.X') {
  require_once 'environments/staging.php';

// Production
} else {
  require_once 'environments/production.php';
}
?>

WPBP defines an additional constant, WPBP_ENV, which enables you to easily check what environment you're running in.

Example: I usually don't want to include the Google Analytics script when I work locally, so here's what I do:

<?php if (WPBP_ENV == 'production'): ?>
  <script> … </script>
<?php endif; ?>

The repo also includes a template .gitignore. Stick it up your project's root folder, and the WP core files will be ignored, along with other files you don't want to track.

Full credit to Joe Bartlett (@jdbartlett) for the template, originally at https://gist.github.com/444295