A Yeoman generator to kickstart your WordPress theme development with an awesome grunt based workflow that utilizes Stylus w/Fluidity, JadePHP, and Coffeescript.
- A super barebones wp theme
- An awesome grunt based development environment that rapidly increases theme development time and developer happiness with fetaures like:
- Compiling, merging and compressing all Stylus files to one style.css file
- Hinting, compiling, merging and compressing all Coffeescript files to one dist.js file
- Sniffing, compiling, and compressing all JadePHP files to PHP files
- A 'dev' task that offers LiveReload on changes to your PHP, Style, and Coffescript files all while hinting, sniffing, compiling, and merging automatically in the background.
- A 'build' task for generating a production ready distribution version of the theme minified and compressed to ship.
You''l need to have Yeoman installed. You can get it through npm.
$ npm install -g yo
Of course you'll also need a working WordPress installation. Checkout YeoPress
npm install -g yo generator-wordpress
Once installed you'll be able to conjure up a wordpress install in any directory with:
yo wordpress
This theme develpoment toolchain also expects some things to be available globally on the system.
In particular, it uses the phpcs binary to check the PHP files for syntax errors so you'll need to install that.
We can and should use Composer the package manager for PHP.
I recommend installing Composer globally. To do so...
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
Next use Composer to install Pear phpcs
composer global require "squizlabs/php_codesniffer=*"
Make sure you have ~/.composer/vendor/bin/ in your PATH.
Add it to your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc like this...
export PATH="~/.composer/vendor/bin/:$PATH"
Finally, you can install wp-fluidity from npm.
npm install -g generator-wp-fluidity
Then from inside a themes directory of a working wordpress install.
yo wp-fluidity
You'll be prompted with a few questions about your theme and when it's all done you'll have a new folder wth your themes name.
To sart developing you'll need to install the dependences the grunt tasks depend on.
First cd into the wp-content/themes/<your theme name>/grunt directory and run:
npm install
Once the install is done You'll be able to fire off the default grunt task (dev) and start developing.Simply by running...
grunt
Or You can run the dev task directly if you like...
grunt dev
This will run all of the preprocessing in development mode (Unminified, and sourcemapped where possible) for the first time generating the theme itself and starts a watcher that will trigger the appropriate tasks as you make changes to files.
Of course, you'll have to fire up a PHP server of some kind to actually serve up WordPress. I'll leave that up to you but I prefer MAMP.
Our toolchain uses several pre-proccessors, linters, uglifiers to make development nicer, easier and cleaner They are as follows...
JadePHP allows us to write our php files using the terse and beautiful syntax of jade. For more information on the syntax and usage check the readme at Jade.PHP
Our jade files our kept in the /jade directory. They are then processed on change and the resulting PHP files are generated in the root of the theme directory.
Coffeescript allows us to write our javascript files using the terse and beautiful syntax of coffeescript.
Our coffeescript files are kept in the /coffee directory. They are then processed on change and the resulting JS files are generated in the root /js/tmp directory.
These JS files will then be Concatenated into just one JS file in /js/dist.js.
During dist this file will also be uglified.
Stylus allows us to write our CSS files using the terse and beautiful syntax of Stylus.
Our stylus files are kept in the /stylus directory. They are then processed on change and the resulting CSS files are generated in the root of the theme directory.
We're using the FluidityCSS framework in our stylus files. Fluidity will be installed and available for use in your stylesheets.
To create a production ready buold of the them in the the /dist directory. Run...
grunt build
This will re-compile all of the source files in their resepective non-source-mapped, minified, or otherwise uglified/compressed manner and copy all the necessary files over to the `/dist' directory.