Interview With James Lane Of ExperimentWith.com

ExperimentWith.com is an idea that’s still at the seedling stage but has the possibilities of being built into a testing platform for various projects. I thought it sounded like a cool idea so I got in touch with James Lane, one of the founders behind the site to ask him what it’s all about.

Q: First off, can you explain what ExperimentWith is?

ExperimentWith.com was started as a testing site for our clients sites while we develop them. It had a nice ring to it and it allowed us to host testing on a separate but not local server. It also allowed for testing in an MU environment. But as we ran into more and more issues with plugins that were never tested on an MU environment so we allowed some authors to test and helped debug a few plugins so we can use them for client projects. After a few projects, we discussed it would be nice to open up our MU based site to who ever wants to use it for testing, debugging or whatever for projects for the community. That was two months ago.

Q: What is going on behind the scenes of ExperimentWith.com and what software or hardware are you using to offer this service?

Behind the scenes its a WordPress MU site running on one of our business class hosting accounts with access to ruby and sass for testing WordPress plugins and themes. Its hosted off our MidPhase account although we have moved most of our site to BlueHost, RackSpace, or ZippyKid. We purchased five years of hosting from MidPhase and said what the hell, lets make it useful and if it becomes popular then we can keep it running.

Q: Is ExperimentWith exclusively tailored for WordPress testing?

We are tailored for WordPress testing but our server has elements running on it to allow for other WordPress integrations like Ruby, SASS, node.js, ect. We like experimenting with other projects out there to see how they can improve, on client specific projects.

Q: It looks like the site is not yet open to the public, do you have a firm date in mind as to when that will happen?

As for going public, we decided to initially start it up as an email us for about your project and if we like it and it won’t cause the end of the world or WordPress as we know it we will give you access. We never thought that more than a few people may take interest in it or would need the resources. So not to dance around your question but Experiment With is a very dynamic project and we are open to help develop it to whatever the community needs.