While developing Siren, I had a need to run some background tasks in WordPress. Siren was built on-top of PHPNomad, so naturally those background tasks were implemented through that system.

The problem was, it was kinda poorly considered, and built in a bit of a hurry to solve my immediate Siren needs, without fully considering what a background task looks like outside of WordPress. The reality is WordPress is really not great at this particular thing, and designing the abstractions for PHPNomad based on WordPress for this was just…not a good idea.

So, I spent some time re-building the abstractions for background tasks in PHPNomad, but this time it’s through the lens of a Redis integration. This is a much more robust way to-do this, and makes it possible to actually use background tasks using PHPNomad outside of a WordPress context, which is something that I find myself doing more and more.

Now if I can just find someone to help me set up the new abstractions to work in the context of WordPress…