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Four Pharmacies in Four States, Four Websites in Eight Days

Over the past week or so, I got to launch four websites for InboundRx: Gore Drug (Oklahoma), Bernie’s Pharmacy (Alaska), Medical Center Pharmacy (Texas), and Capitol Pharmacy (California). The deployment process involved the creation of a development site for each client on a Cloud 9 work space, on which I customize the WordPress theme via making code changes to the template PHP and CSS files while InboundRx’s designer and copywriter would populate the site’s content.

Once the design and content reached a stable plateau, I would then create an AWS EC2 instance – based on an Amazon Machine Image of a ready-to-configure WordPress site on an Ubuntu LAMP server – and migrate the theme, plugins, and content from the Cloud 9 IDE to the EC2 instance. In two of these cases, I registered the client domains with Amazon’s Route 53 Cloud DNS and set up zone records to direct traffic to the appropriate public IP address. For all four sites, I used Let’s Encrypt and Certbot to enable HTTPS/SSL.

I’m currently exploring options to make the deployment process even more hands-free and automated. While deployment pipeline scenarios for Node and other frameworks seem well defined and have lots of examples, I’d need to do a bit of research to determine what best practices exist for humble WordPress sites.

Live sites: