Enhance WordPress development with quality tools

Building tools, themes, plugins, and apps in WordPress requires a variety of different things if we want to make sure we have the best necessary tools.

If you ask 10 different people which tool they prefer, not only will you get a variety of answers (from IDEs to dependency management applications to build tools), but you'll also get a variety of Various answers Different answers, all of which provide similar functionality you may need.

For example, some of the things you might read include:

• Purr

• Bower
• composer

• Code package
• JSLint
• ...and more

This doesn’t even scratch the surface of topics like web servers, database systems, and PHP versions. All of these are important topics that should be discussed, but in their own posts.

Some non-negotiables related to getting your job done efficiently when using WordPress include the following:

1. An IDE
2. In debugger
3. Code inspection and minification
4. version control
5. Deployment tools

As with most things, developers have their own specific choices about the tools they like to use and why they like to use them.

In this article, I will share some tools that I like to use and find useful in my professional WordPress development work; however, I want to clarify that this is not a definitive list of which tools you should use.

Instead, think of this as a guide to examples of what constitutes a quality tool for quality development. If you're happy with the toolset you're using, that's great! But if you're looking for something to help you get your job done in a more efficient way, then maybe these will get you on the right track.

Before I begin, I do want to share that I use OS X, so a lot of my recommendations will be based on that platform. However, many of the applications I use have Windows and Linux counterparts as well as tools that are open source and available across platforms.

1. IDE

Having an IDE for writing code is crucial. Of course, some developers prefer something as simple as TextEdit or Notepad. More power to them! However, if you are looking for features with syntax highlighting, code completion, plugin support, S/FTP integration, or even version control integration, there are several tools available.

Personally, my IDE of choice is Coda 2.

This particular IDE causes divided opinion in WordPress development. Some people like Atom, some people like Sublime Text, some people like Vim, some people like PHPStorm, and they all have their own advantages.

Personally, I like Coda 2 because of the ongoing support, updates, mobile versions of the app, and overall look and feel. I like the progress they've made in supporting platforms like WordPress, and the built-in code completion is great.

Of course, other IDEs offer the exact same functionality; however, if you choose to use Coda, here are a few plugins that I prefer for WordPress development. names not listed in order:

• WordPress Mode for Coda 2
• PHP documentation block generator
• Albino

Of course, you can also install many other components.

For other IDEs you recommend, be sure to check out the conclusion to see how we hope to incorporate them into the comment feed for this particular post.

2. Debugger

The debugger is one of the most powerful tools in any developer's toolbox. For those unfamiliar, this software allows you to monitor what your source code is doing at runtime by looking at what the program is doing.

This enables you to:

• View which function is triggering
• View the value of each variable
• Skip some functions you want to avoid
• Go to the feature you want to see (e.g. WordPress core features)
• ...there are more

Many IDEs (such as PHPStorm) come with built-in debuggers. But if you choose to use another IDE that doesn't include a debugger natively, then I highly recommend Codebug.

This is an elegant and easy-to-use debugger that gives you all the features of a native debugger, but in a standalone application. It's well worth adding this to your arsenal.

Warning: If you are new to debugging and/or unsure of how the system works, be sure to read the documentation. It's actually relatively easy to learn, but it does have its learning curve.

Once you get used to using a debugger, though, you'll wonder how you ever lived without one.

3. Code inspection and minification tools

Code inspection and minification tools may be two separate topics, but now, they are so closely integrated that I think they deserve to be included together.

examine

First of all, for those who are unfamiliar, linting is basically the process of ensuring that your code (in this case, JavaScript code) conforms to certain standards. That is, it doesn't use any bad practices.

According to Wikipedia:

lint was originally the name of a specific program that marked some questionable and non-portable constructs (possibly bugs) in C source code. The term now generally applies to tools that flag suspicious usage in software written in any computer language.

In our case, we have tools like JSLint and JSHint that allow us to do this with JavaScript code.

You can certainly find linting for other languages ​​as well, but arguably the most common case you'll find linting in WordPress is with JavaScript. You can also find this functionality in any of the build tools mentioned at the beginning of this article.

Zoom

Minification is the process of taking a language (whether it's CSS, Sass, LESS, JavaScript, etc.) and turning it into a more compact file by removing all whitespace, long variable names, etc. p>

The idea is not to create obfuscated code, but to create lightweight files that you can serve to browsers in production so that your site loads faster because less content needs to be downloaded.

There is also the concept of concatenation which is beyond the scope of this article, but the idea behind concatenation is that all minified scripts and stylesheets will be combined into a single file, so that the browser only needs to make two requests - one for each file.

Regardless, all of the above tools will also be responsible for providing minification (and concatenation) of scripts and styles and outputting them to a directory of your choice.

4.Version Control

Whenever you work on a code base, whether on your own or with a team, it's always helpful to make sure you maintain a consistent version of the software.

In a nutshell, version control is a way to commit code to a repository so that when you or your team members make changes, the latest version of the code is maintained so you can see the history Actions are completed and you can roll back to a point in the timeline if something goes wrong.

In terms of what software is best for version control, there are tools like Subversion, Git, and Mercurial.

If you are used to working in the WordPress economy, you are most likely familiar with Subversion as the core uses it to maintain changes in the system.

Similarly, if you ever build and publish plugins, you must use Subversion to commit code, tag your releases, etc.

But Git is becoming more and more popular. Arguably, the two most popular Git hosting sites are GitHub and Bitbucket. Regardless, if you're looking for a reliable Git client, I highly recommend Tower 2.

While this is my chosen client, there are many other options. Ultimately, the point is to make sure that you're adding your code to source control, that you're working with a customer that you like, and that if possible, you've connected it to a deployment system so that every time you push a specific feature or requirement, the customer The environment used to review products will be updated with the new code.

5.Deployment tools

The standard, high-level workflow we follow whenever you work on building a WordPress project (or any software project) is:

• A development environment where we have a local computer for development.
• A staging environment where we deploy the code so that the client can hammer on the project while we work on the requirements.
• Then comes the production environment, which is where the final project will be deployed.

At this point, it is not uncommon to connect the deployment system to source code management software so that every time a new update is committed to the source code repository, the latest version of the project is released.

Fortunately, there are many great tools for setting up automated deployments.

Code Ship

Codeship positions itself as a continuous integration service that can execute the necessary scripts to build, test, and deploy your project, all within a Git commit.

This means you can execute multiple scripts to trigger during deployment and receive notifications before anything is put into production.

Depending on the size of your team and/or project, Codeship is a great solution, especially for larger organizations comprised of owners, managers, project managers, etc.

That being said, I have personally used this tool on a two-person team and was pleased with the results.

Deploy robot

DeployBot was formerly known as Dploy.io. Similar to Codeship, DeployBot is designed to take source code submitted to a Git repository and deploy it to an environment of your choice.

It is also able to run scripts, build and compile code, and deploy it to different environments based on the configuration you provide.

Of course, these are not all deployment tools available, but you may find the following two when working in a professional software capacity. Each of them has its own pros and cons for what you might be trying to do; however, since this is not a review or comparison article, I'll leave that exercise up to you to determine which workflow works best for you .

in conclusion

As mentioned in the introduction, these tools are nothing more than suggestions on where to start with some WordPress development tools. I know many of you have your own preferences regarding the use of each of the above criteria.

With that said, I hope you all will share in the comments which tools you like and why you like using them. This way, current and future readers not only get posts containing recommendations, but also comments that offer alternatives.

After all, development is about more than solving problems. It's about finding tools that make us happy even when we're spending eight or so hours a day working in front of our computers.

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