Developer enthusiasts will remember the tools that were available for portability on WordPress. The initial entry of WordPress in the web development market was still relatively now when the prospective bloggers adopted its free service as the “choice” tool to adopt. There is the narrative of Joomla stepping into the fray and considerably challenging WordPress in the market. Most of those market confrontations can now be succinctly considered as recent history. And we can sum it up and say that WordPress is more or less the undisputed leader for tools in web development and CMS technology.
OpenShift comes into the fray as a PAAS (platform as a service) and brings with it the capability to run and host a variety of software without too much of a hassle.
“Platform as a Service allows users to create software applications using tools supplied by the provider. PaaS services can consist of preconfigured features that customers can subscribe to; they can choose to include the features that meet their requirements while discarding those that do not. Consequently, packages can vary from offering simple point-and-click frameworks where no client side hosting expertise is required to supplying the infrastructure options for advanced development.”
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of a PAAS should check it out here
To get back to OpenShift it runs on RHELs system and can be used to run and host a variety of software. The best part for developers might be how it connects with Git as well and lets you maintain your code. Certainly for WordPress functionality it is an added bonus. The concept here is that it lets you maintain the different versions of code under Git whilst giving you the flexibility to be able to run those different codes in the OpenShift environment.
The other important thing to mention here is resource allocation which more commonly is known as Gears in the cloud computing world. To save you all from it being too technical, it basically means that you can choose from three types of virtual memories upon which to run your source code. Think of it as a mini memory machine being present in digital sense. So you have the choice between a 512 MB RAM or 1 GB or 2 GB RAM. They all come with their varying costs and allocating measures so that is something which needs to be read more before choosing the service.
Is it something that necessarily works? Well the procedure is relatively simple. So first for one you have to register yourself here. The registration process will talk you through the basic types of your application and ask you to paste your source code at the site whilst asking about your Gears utilization as well as the type of application that you want to run. Once the Create Application procedure is done, you are basically left with the configuration of WordPress which is something not too difficult to achieve.
The configuration process is mostly dependent on how you have written the code for your WordPress application. But it also means you have to register your newly created app from the list provided by the WordPress servers.
As stated above the configuration of running a blog is not that different from the different applications you can run on OpenShift. The main difference this tool provides in the relative ease it allows you to create your apps on both ends and then install it on WordPress. As a prospective app model you can read more about but you can just learn as much about it from the host’s site.
