Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

WordPress

Guido Grulke
Guido Grulke
20,948 Points
Posted by Guido Grulke
Guido Grulke
20,948 Points

Development Environment for WordPress

Hi all,

may I ask how you do your development for WordPress projects (especially for client projects) ? I want to set up a reliable development environment. Could you pls. provide some suggestions based on your experiences and best-practises?

What I do so far:

2 step process - 1. local development - 2. live site for production

  • use a MAC with Desktop-Server-Premium (it's a really cool tool).
  • use the sublime editor and a couple of browsers.
  • File upload via ftp to the client site (using cyberduck and filezilla2)

my plans are:

3 step process - 1. local development - 2. staging site (test and customer preview) on the same server as production - 3. live site for production

there's a cool post from WordCamp Israel - development environments

  • use git for source control
  • test capistrano as deployment tool

Are you using tools like phpStorm or something similar? I'm looking for a tool which provides an easy overview of the dependencies and available classes/objects.

Are there any hints for inside WordPress tools in addition to the developer plugin ?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.

4 Answers

William Whitworth
William Whitworth
6,117 Points
William Whitworth
William Whitworth
6,117 Points

Generally my process for Wordpress production is - Design, Sketchpad and depending on the mood I'm in, Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator, or InDesign (I like to stay active in all programs just to stay familiar with the interfaces).

I then move the work into Sublime Text, start with HTML 5 Boilerplate, and write up all the HTML,CSS, and JS (I may try a new framework or just create my own).

For Wordpress Local Development, I use MAMP Pro, testing on all devices I own and browserstack.com for everything else. phpMyAdmin to manage databases. I'm just starting with git, I haven't used it with a client project yet, but have for my own projects while learning.

Depending on the client, I generally stage through Amazon servers, setting up a dev domain, and then migrating to a live domain.

Oh, and as for FTP... I use either Fetch, or Coda, I tend to use Coda more because of the Text Editor (it also use to be my goto before I discovered Sublime Text, so I revisit a lot).

I actually haven't used PHPStorm, it looks like a great tool for development. I don't know if you know about Sublime Text packages, but they have been helpful for my Wordpress projects. https://sublime.wbond.net is a good place to find some great Wordpress specific packages.

Some Sublime Text Packages:

Guido Grulke
Guido Grulke
20,948 Points
Guido Grulke
Guido Grulke
20,948 Points

thanks for your insides - I will test the Sublime Text Packages. Do you have any ideas for the time after fireworks? Balsamiq is not my tool.

Holger Liesegang
Holger Liesegang
50,595 Points
Holger Liesegang
Holger Liesegang
50,595 Points

Hi Guido, "time after fireworks" :-) I've nearly given up on Adobe (no more upgrades or cloud for me) and am now using Pixelmator and Sketch with increasing frequency. Kind Regards Holger

Guido Grulke
Guido Grulke
20,948 Points
Guido Grulke
Guido Grulke
20,948 Points

Hi Holger, thx - that look's interesting to me. I'll give both a try.