After breakfast came in, I had an interesting conversation with our project lead, Adam Caron, about our experiences in meditation, which led to to a discussion about the role of meaning and identity in our daily life. I related the experience of trying to meditate in a Theory of Knowledge class in high school, which ended in uncontrollable laughter and expulsion from the classroom. I’ve had a bit better luck since then.

Our client, Brian Thompson of EVKids.org, arrived just a few minutes ago. The immediate task list is a combination of technical fixes for his WordPress-based website + the addition of “interactive elements”, which we need to dig into a bit deeper this morning.

In the meantime, I’ve installed BackWPUp, a WordPress backup plugin, to see what it’s capable of doing. It’s Multisite-compatible, which is nice since my own main websites are WordPress Networks; not every plugin can work with them.

Looking over the settings panel for the plugin, it seems that it’s based on the creation of backup “jobs”, which is perhaps too jargon-y already to consider for our client. Clicking the “Add Job” button revealed an enormous number of options related to the database tables to back-up, file folders, etc, and the manner with which to back up the resulting archive file. It also does not seem to do restorations of the database.

Checking out XCloner next. It failed to run properly on my test installation, and the means of accessing its menu is different from the usual ways WordPress plugins operate. I just canned it…don’t like it.

I’m going to take another sweep through the plugin directory for backups. Noting that the WordPress backup page is a useful starting point for the client, potentially, to understand the need for backup.

After scanning through the backup plugins again, nothing obvious jumps out. If I were backing up the files, the simplest would be to just tar-gz my wp-content directory (after nuking any cache directories) and use some MySQL commands to make a database dump. Restoring a backup is more of a pain, but is straightforward. I guess using BackWPUp for the client is an acceptable solution in that it appears to do what it needs to do, though it’s not end-user friendly. If I think of it as a failsafe, but requiring an experienced developer to restore, that is probably good enough…will have to confer with the rest of the team to see what the consensus is.