Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More
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The next version of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate is officially tagged and available for download in GitHub.
This release – although a minor improvement over the last – introduces several improvements to 2.6.0, and also marks a change in the development of the project, as well as the introduction of several things that will be coming to the Boilerplate in the next several versions.
After talking about my post-Standard plans yesterday, I received several questions – some on Twitter, some via email – about my use of LESS rather than Sass since Sass is going into WordPress core.
@tommcfarlin Any thoughts on switching to Sass since its going into core?
— Tom Harrigan (@TomHarrigan) November 19, 2013
It’s a good question, to be sure, and it’s one I’ve thought about since this ticket in Trac. Since I’ve been using LESS for over a year in various projects, I’ve had to decide how I want to move forward with development of those projects and future projects, as well.
Since Standard is no longer is active development and support is currently being managed by the stellar guys at WooThemes, a couple of people have asked me what my preferred theme and/or my preferred theme shop is.
There are several amazing theme companies out there. I don’t have a favorite, but you likely already know the good ones by name because they are the ones who are most currently the most prominent.
If you were to select a theme from one of those companies, then you’d be good to go.
That said, as much as I’ve enjoyed building, using, and sharing Standard, and as much as I love supporting other WordPress companies (heck, I bought a theme from one of them just yesterday), I still see my blog as a very personal property – as many do – and since I clearly love building things for WordPress, I’m in the process of building a theme that will serve as the next iteration of this blog.
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I think that the way in which we subscribe to our favorite sites is changing – that is to say that although I think RSS is here to stay and there are some really good apps available for it, not everyone is using that particular format as much as they once did.
It’s evident that some people are now relying more on services like Twitter, Pocket, and even email digests of weekly news.
And though I considered doing that for this site (and it was split about 50/50), I ultimately decided it would be easier just give readers the option to opt-in by email.
Now that WordPress 3.8 is in development, now is a good time to look into contributing a patch.
But seriously, if you’re looking into contributing to the codebase, then it’s important to be familiar with two things:
Once you’ve gotten those two things setup, you can actually setup customized Grunt tasks (via your own options) that will help test the work that you’re doing without kicking off the entire process, a part of the process, or testing individual files.
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