Using WPEngine's CDN

It turns out that using the CDN with WPEngine causes a few issues. The first was a problem with also having SSL on. A session with the chat desk resolved it. Next, the development URLs persisted (account-name.wpengine.com instead of website-url.com). Another chat session took care of that – well, two more chat sessions as I found a few instances of this issue. This second item could not be resolved by my clearing the cache, unfortunately.

Then, today, I noticed a third issue. It turns out that the CDN was serving the style sheets and I suppose stored references to that. So when I downloaded a backup for local development, I floundered for half a day wondering why style updates were not taking hold. Was I in the correct directory? Was my local MAMP software running correctly? Was it something with the custom plugin I was coding styles for?

I was inspecting the heck outta the pages, trying to source the pain. Eventually, I checked the Network feature of the Inspector (Firefox) to check how items were loading. Once there, I noticed that style assets were loading in from the CDN, so of course any changes or flushing I did were not being reflected on my local install. Ouch.

After another chat session, I resolved that the solution was:

1. In WpEngine, turn off the CDN;
2. Create a new Restore Point;
3. Download a backup of this new RP;
4. Create local dev environment with this;
5. Logo back into WPEngine and turn on the CDN again.

This is kind of a pain because steps #1, 2, and 3 each require some behind the scenes activity from the folks at WPEngine, which means I click a button and wait around for each step. How long? I dunno. Sometimes a backup is spun up in as little as 10 seconds. But I received a notice that turning off the CDN will take 10 minutes.