There’s nothing wrong with making mistakes, in fact I highly recommend it. However, if I make a mistake and I have no plan for preventing it from happening again, that feels pretty lame. One mistake I have made before, is forgetting if I am on a live installation or a staging installation. When I say live and staging, I’m referring to WP-Engine’s excellent system.
I made this mistake recently while working on a site for a friend, and it was embarrassing. I decided that a good way to prevent it, would be to add an obvious visual cue to alert the user when they are on a staging site. I found some time this week to write a small plugin that does exactly that:
See the yellow “hazard” tape at the bottom? If you click it, it fades out so it’s not in the way. It’s my way of saying, “Hey! You are on staging.”
Instead of hosting this plugin in our normal repository, I decided to host it on WordPress.org. That way I can use it on my friend’s site, in addition to our LexBlog sites. And so can you:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/lxb-staging-reminder/