As Zivtech’s Marketing Manager, I’m by far not the most technical member of our staff. Since the developers see our website from a different perspective than I do, it’s sometimes challenging to communicate the changes that the marketing team would like to see. I can explain an idea, but I won’t necessarily know how it will look once it’s executed. This is where Probo comes in. 

Probo uses pre-built Docker images to power the docker containers that run each Probo build. These Probo Docker images were previously provisioned using Puppet, which is a tool we’ve used at Zivtech for server provisioning for a long time. Over the last year, we switched to using Ansible to provision these images, which was a fairly smooth transition after we figured out the new Ansible syntax. Overall, Ansible has made our Probo image builder code cleaner and easier to manage. 

Have you been meaning to give Probo a spin but haven't had a chance? We created this five minute exercise (seriously, we timed it) for you to see your first build in action:

Agile development was built on the idea that the development process should be collaborative. Cross-functional teams should work together to produce high quality results that are flexible to change. The agile development manifesto values individuals and interactions over processes and tools, so any tools used in the process should make it easier for individuals to work together. 

We built Probo from the ground up with open source software (OSS) as a top priority. Zivtech, the company that built and supports Probo, is an “OSS shop,” and our values are OSS to the core. We value open source in our own code and product as well as the OSS that the broader development community is building. We’re focused on making Probo free and easy to use for OSS developers via the Probo.ci SaaS app. 

In our last post, we covered how to set up a WPEngine site using Probo. This post will walk you through how to use Probo once your initial site is set up.

As a recent addition to the Zivtech team who doesn’t come from a technical background, I’ve been exposed to a lot of new technologies and terminologies. When our CEO assigned the task of getting a WPEngine site to work with Probo, I knew it would be a challenging learning experience.  With less technical expertise than many other WPEngine users, I was prepared for potential speed bumps along the way. 

We often talk about Probo in regards to Drupal development because we do a lot of Drupal work at Zivtech. We originally built Probo to eliminate bottlenecks in our development workflow on our Drupal projects, but it can also be used to test any PHP and MySQL based application like WordPress or any other LAMP based CMS platforms.

Thanks to contributor Michael Bagnall, also known as ElusiveMind on GitHub, our Probo Docs now include a section on setting up the Probo Open Source project!

At this year’s BADCamp I did a session with Thom Toogood, a Lead Drupal Developer at Deloitte Digital Australia, on Shift Left Testing and Continuous Collaboration.