When it comes to working with WordPress plugins, it’s not uncommon to see people using more modern tools such as Composer, front-end dependency management via tools such as Node, and so on.

In fact, I’d say the most popular is probably the Sage project from the Roots team. It’s great, but recently some friends and I stumbled across the Tonik WordPress Starter Theme, and I had the pleasure of talking with the lead of the project, Patryk.

So for those of you who are interested in more modern workflows, tools, and strategies and employing them within the context of theme development, I think Tonik is worth checking out.

It didn’t take me long to get an instance of the theme spun up on my local machine. But the point of this isn’t about my experience with it – it’s why I think it’s worth checking out.

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If you write object-oriented code for WordPress (usually within the context of plugins), you’re likely to come across a class_exists check before initializing a class. But we should start avoiding class_exists in much of our code at this point (with a few exceptions that I’ll outline below).

Depending on the version of PHP you’re using, this makes sense. Or it did at one time. As of PHP 5.3.0, this isn’t necessary. Instead, it’s a better practice to use namespaces.

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Let’s say you’re working on a page template and it’s going to include a partial that’s going to display recent custom post types (or maybe even the standard post type) of the post type you’re viewing.

For example, say you’re looking at the example of stories or something like that. And you’re looking at a single page for a given author. Then, perhaps in the sidebar, it reads Read More From Other Authors, and it retrieves stories from up to five other authors.

Where additional custom post types may appear.

Writing a custom WP_Query, pulling back the five most recent posts, and dropping them into the selected area seems easy enough, right?

And it is. But there’s a gotcha.

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