Some awesome tools you must use in WordPress development

WordPress is still the best choice if you need to accompany a Rails application with a simple blog or a complex editorial area. These are some of the best tools I’m using to bring to WordPress some of the nice technologies and practices I’m used to in Ruby on Rails development.

Wordmove

Wordmove is a Ruby gem to automatically sync a WordPress installation (files and DB) through multiple environments (local, staging, production). It supports SSH and FTP transfers so you no longer need painful manual transfers through FTP and phpMyAdmin since it works also on low cost hosting providers with FTP access only.

Wordmove provides great granularity about which files to sync (uploads, themes, plugins…); updating the theme on staging with the local changes will be as easy as:

wordmove push -t -e staging

If you want to update your local environment with the production DB you can use:

wordmove pull -d -e production

Grunt wordpress deploy

Grunt wordpress deploy is a Wordmove alternative written by my colleague Dario Ghilardi built as a Grunt plugin so you can fully automatize your deploys thanks to the provided tasks.

Wordless

From the creators of Wordmove, it’s probably the coolest starter theme for WordPress, among the best features provided by Wordless: a well organized structure for your custom theme, a nice routing, haml views with layouts and partials, useful view helpers, sass and coffeescript support.

Roots Theme

Roots is a great starting theme based on Bootstrap with built in Less support. A good choice if you don’t want to introduce tools not every WordPress developer will be familiar to as for the Wordless theme.

WordPress Packagist

WordPress Packagist is a mirror of every WordPress plugin and theme as a Composer repository. Thanks to this project you can easily manage your dependencies through Composer, the standard dependency manager for PHP.

I hope you find these tools useful and this article will make you “Stop writing themes like it’s 1998.” as said by the Wordless developers.