WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP. Easy to use, reliable, secure, and highly customizable, it’s no wonder it’s the most popular CMS on the market! These qualities make it easy for Marketing teams, rather than developers, to manage a company’s website or blog.

A Marketing team armed with a WordPress website supported by developers using BuildMaster is a mighty force. Let’s look at why so many companies choose WordPress, what “MarketingOps” is, and how BuildMaster facilitates it.

WordPress and MarketingOps 

Adding to the simplicity of WordPress itself, many organizations choose to host WordPress on popular, professional-grade hosting services like Pressable, Pantheon, and WP Engine. The most immediate benefit of professional-grade WordPress hosting providers is that they mostly remove the need for IT to be involved with the hardware and server management for WordPress. With minimal training, the marketing team can then become responsible for:

• Upgrading WordPress itself using the control panel
• “Cloning” WordPress instances to allow for
  • Site testing
  • Upgrades that don’t affect production
  • Testing custom plugins and themes without affecting production
  • Blue/Green development of complex new content

But this doesn’t mean IT is now fully out of the process. IT should still be available to facilitate customizations as well as to enable best practices in modern marketing — or “MarketingOps.”

MarketingOps

“Marketing Operations” is a known term (and sometimes even a buzzword) used to describe “end-to-end marketing optimization— from planning and budgeting to execution and analysis.” Like DevOps, MarketingOps is about using automation and process improvement to facilitate better communication and faster changes. Thinking of Marketing Operations as “MarketingOps” (like DevOps) emphasizes the end-to-end responsibility, strategic use of automation, and fast iteration speeds characteristic of companies deploying software using DevOps. These pieces work together, and WordPress helps.

WordPress simplifies building and maintaining a website, and at its core, it is very reliable and secure because it’s maintained by the WordPress team in Marketing. But because Marketing, rather than Dev, is “running the show,” the team will turn to very popular, but sometimes very risky third-party themes and plugins when making changes.

Because they are managed by the community, there are a number of concerns surrounding third-party themes and plugins, which include:

• Unknown maintenance of plugins and themes,
• Unknown third-party tools used to build plugins or themes,
• Unclear what data may be inadvertently exposed to your end-users.

Because not all themes in the directory will fit your look and feel and to avoid security concerns, many organizations will task a development team (either inside the company or at a marketing agency) with building custom themes and plugins to meet their visual and security needs.

This is where BuildMaster can be a game-changer.

BuildMaster Streamlines the Marketing/Dev Relationship

BuildMaster facilitates both the technological side of MarketingOps (building, testing, and releasing custom themes and plugins) AND the communication side.

BuildMaster is a communication and automation tool because it will:

• Allow developers to build and maintain the customization of WordPress while still allowing your Marketing team to own the website and content
• Segregate your testing environments from your production environment, which allows for different versions of the themes and plugins to be built and tested prior to being to production
• Automate the communication between development and marketing
• Notify the right people or group at the right time (e.g., when a plugin is ready)
• Require the proper approvals are met before changes are elevated between environments

And to make this even easier, BuildMaster 6.2 features a real, script-level application template for Dev to quickly and reliably create new WordPress themes and plugins for your Marketing team and to test them with the same rigor as any other application. To learn more about these application templates, check out the webinar video and written tutorial.

See for yourself how BuildMaster simplifies and facilitates MarketingOps:

Inedo DevOps tools maximize developer time, minimize release risk, and empower stakeholders to bring their vision to life faster. All with the people and technology you have right now.