Earlier this month, I mentioned that I was looking to bring the WordPress Widget Boilerplate and the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate to 1.0. Throughout the month, I received a several pull requests most of which I merged into the projects.

I made a few changes that I’ll detail momentarily, but as of right now both WordPress Plugin Boilerplates are officially tagged as 1.0 and are available in their respective GitHub repositories.

WordPress Plugin Boilerplates

Since the beginning, the goal of these two projects has been to provide the best starting place possible for each type of WordPress plugin.

When I first started working on them, I knew much less about WordPress as I do now and I wasn’t as tapped into the community. As such, the boilerplates were more or less for personal use; however, as I spent more time building WordPress-based projects and getting to know people in the community, the boilerplates began to take shape.

As of today, each of the WordPress Boilerplates features the following:

  • Close alignment with both the Widget API and the Plugin API. The boilerplates seek to enforce WordPress Coding Standards and provide guardrails to make sure that you’re using best practices when building your widgets.
  • File organization structure to make sure that your stylesheets and JavaScript assets are well-organized in order to make maintenance and future development as easy as possible. The organization also aims to improve cohesion and enforce a logical separation of concerns.
  • PHPDoc comments to make sure each function is clear, and to make sure that your own personal efforts are using the conventions.
  • Various TODO‘s located throughout the code so that you know exactly what you need to do in order to get your work underway.
  • Support for easy localization including pre-made .PO files.

Make no mistake: These boilerplates aren’t meant to support copying and pasting a ton of code in order to quickly ship a product. Instead, they are meant to provide a solid foundation off of which to build quality plugins, and off of which to improve your WordPress skills.

Finally, I greatly appreciate all of the contributions and comments on the project.

Plans For Version 2?

The short answer is “I don’t know.” But there’s more to it than that.

One of the challenges of working on an open source project is maintaining a clear vision. Several times, I’ve received some great pull requests that I really like but are really outside the scope of what I have in mind for the project.

It can be tough to decide what to include because a pull request may actually add something really cool to the project, but it doesn’t fall in line with the vision or the core purpose of what the project is supposed to be doing.

In thinking ahead to the next version, it’s hard to say exactly what will be added. I know that if this thing continues to be forked, followed, starred, and/or used, then there will be questions and improvements; however, those are nearly impossible to anticipate.

I do think that, at some point, there will be support for LESS (or possibly Sass depending on which one wins out in popularity) and for JSLint-based JavaScript, but there’s no need to rush it yet. Not everyone uses those and I don’t want to enforce that on users.

At any rate, the WordPress Boilerplates have finally reached a level where I’m comfortable tagging them as 1.0 so be sure to checkout the Widget Boilerplate and the Plugin Boilerplate.

As always, shoot me any feedback or feel free to open a pull request.