Automating My WordPress Workflow

I’m always looking for ways to speed up my development time when creating WordPress themes - whether it’s theme templates, Coda clips, or using both computers to make things go faster. Here are a few things I do to automate my WordPress workflow, from the initial PSD slicing to uploading the final product.

HTML/CSS Template

I have a copy-and-paste folder that is always used when beginning any website. It has two files - index.html and style.css - and two folders - ‘images’ and ‘js’. The index.html file has a basic, empty template with links to a stylesheet and a JavaScript file and a basic page structure that I use most often. The CSS file has common selectors and attributes, and the ‘js’ folder has a copy of the latest release of the jQuery library.

Download my HTML/CSS Template

Basic Theme Template

You may have already seen my WordPress Starter Theme. This isn’t a framework, and it doesn’t work right out of the box. Instead, it gives me a blank theme to start from with all the necessary files and functions I almost always use.

Download my Starter Theme

Using Two Computers, or Mac OS X’s Spaces

Spaces I have two Macs on my desk - a 20″ iMac and a white 13″ MacBook. I find it easiest to open the HTML file in Firefox on the MacBook - whether it’s on a server, or on my iMac - and use the other for the PSD and coding. I utilize two spaces on the iMac (and three when I don’t use the MacBook) - the first for the PSD, and the second for Coda, or whichever program I’m using to write the code.

Coda Clips

I use Panic’s Coda, which is an all-in-one text editor and FTP editor available for Macs. It has a feature called “Cips” that lets you store code snippets that can be called just by typing a few user-defined letters and hitting the Tab key. With the latest Coda update, clips can now be stored as groups as well as imported and exported. Thanks to this addition we’ve created the WordPress Coda Clips collection, which includes a ton of WordPress tags that can be pulled up with a few keystrokes.

Download WPCandy’s WordPress Coda Clips Collection

A “Proper” WordPress Development Installation

It’s easy to set up your own WordPress installation to test your themes on, but an out-of-the-box installation won’t do much by itself. You need pages and subpages, categories and child categories, lots of posts, and various HTML tags in those posts to create a great theme. We released the Sample WordPress Content XML import last week that includes plenty of pages, categories, and posts so you can make sure things like images, blockquotes, and various headers are formatted before you release a theme.

Download our Sample WordPress Content

What else do you do to speed up your development workflow? Let us know in the comments.

Dan Philibin September 22nd, 2008 Articles, Tutorials

21 Responses to “Automating My WordPress Workflow”

Keith
Posted on September 22nd, 2008 at 7:32 AM

Excellent insight into others work flow and thanks for the sample wordpress content!

Michael Cromarty
Posted on September 22nd, 2008 at 3:02 PM

Thats some nice information, Thanks for sharing.

Jordan
Posted on September 22nd, 2008 at 3:50 PM

You know I’ve honestly never though of importing fake data to fill up for content and various classes and whatnot. I’m definitely going to use that right now for any other Wordpress projects I do that need filler content.

Dainis Graveris
Posted on September 22nd, 2008 at 4:54 PM

That’s great! Just what I needed..!

Tommy Day
Posted on September 22nd, 2008 at 9:39 PM

WPCandy is quickly becomming the site I check the most every day! Keep it Up!

Ps - LOVE WPCoder’s design.

Joel
Posted on September 23rd, 2008 at 7:55 AM

Very nice! Great job guys.

codebounce.com
Posted on September 23rd, 2008 at 2:31 PM

Might be, this is a silly question…
Is there a way to automate adding a common set of plugins to a theme?

http://www.codebounce.com/Wordpress

Kimbo
Posted on September 24th, 2008 at 11:37 AM

Hi Dan,
Awesome article you’ve written. It sums up about every obstacle a designer needs to tackle when creating a new wordpress theme.

Also very nice of you to provide all your resources described in your article! I’ll be using your test-content XML file A LOT as I make a couple of themes for our clients per week…

Again, Thanks a lot, and keep on doing great community work!

Greets

Jason
Posted on September 25th, 2008 at 12:52 AM

I’ve seen you talk about Coda alot - and I’m pretty sure that Transmit is the FTP client embedded in Coda, have you had problems with Transmit not honoring your Line Endings? IE using UNIX (LF) and Transmit converts it to a WIN (CRLF) on upload?

It’s not a big deal for most of my PHP files but the file that I’m using as executable CLI scripts fail miserably with the extra (CR)

Just looking for your thoughts

Dan Philibin
Posted on September 25th, 2008 at 6:58 AM

@Jason Coda gives me an option to convert the line endings, so I don’t really have any problems there.

JamieO
Posted on September 26th, 2008 at 3:47 PM

Building on the concept of a dev environment and fake data - what about a solution for staging / production environments and managing migrations between them? There are 3 scenarios which must be factored:

1) Pure data - Create a new post / page which updates the database.
2) Pure file - Theme file change - no database update.
3) Mixed data / files - Upload a new plugin, activate it, then add the function calls from your theme.

How can you promote these changes without having to re-do the set of actions you did in your dev (or staging) environment in production?

Using staging for all your content changes and then a complete database extract, modify, import while in some form of ‘outage mode’ only works if you don’t have any production data (users) that don’t exist in both.

зизи
Posted on October 1st, 2008 at 3:20 PM

Сперто с лица Земли.

Fausto Pacheco
Posted on October 15th, 2008 at 3:50 PM

I can easy say, I LOVE YOU, ;P

Amir S.
Posted on October 16th, 2008 at 9:11 PM

may i suggest that:
1) try to use a source control (git or svn or cvs or something)
2) use WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL while on dev (i.e. define these variables only if strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"],”localhost”) !== false)

see:
- http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=70
- http://trac.wordpress.org/changeset/5093

to deploy:
- create a batch script or bash script (depending on your OS) that does a svn deployment (i.e. svn up)
- use mysqldump to deploy blog postings