(In hindsight, not so) quick, but probably necessary backstory:
Up to about 2017 I worked as a „Full Stack“ designer. Design work was my priority, but I helped small businesses with their web presence as well. Depending on the project, I used early WordPress page builders or framework themes, but I created quite a few custom WordPress themes from scratch as well. As I’m completely self-taught (I started using WordPress and modifying themes back around 2006 or so) I probably did plenty of things not exactly „by the book“, learned stuff like Git by trial and error and never touched things that seemed too „code’y“ for me. Design and User Experience was always my priority, still the custom themes I created were performant, easy to use, the customers were happy, so I guess I did an okay job.
Then I took the opportunity for a career change and pretty much left web development behind. That must have been around the time the Gutenberg Editor was introduced or started to get more usable, but I never actively worked with that. I still maintained a personal blog, but only fixed bugs or updated a PHP template for posts or pages.
Two years ago, I hired a developer to create a new theme for said blog. This was before Full-Page Editing was introduced, so I wanted a „classic“ theme, but wanted Gutenbergs Editor functions for a more modern editing experience. Unfortunately, that developer didn’t do a good job, core features were missing or not working, they charged far more than the quality of the work was worth, and so we parted ways.
Now I am trying to get back into WordPress development a bit, to at least fix what they started. The problem is, that I struggle even with the „first“ thing: The development stack (is that what it’s called?).
Said developer used Lando which I unfortunately find painfully slow and – as someone who isn’t that comfortable around purely text-based config files and the terminal, let alone Webpack – confusing. My Lando projects also just completely stopped working twice on me, so I don’t find it very reliable.
Back in the day, I set up a local server via MAMP (later with Local) and used CodeKit (unfortunately a Mac only app) to compile SASS files, install npm dependencies, minify JavaScript, get Browser Sync going with a mouse click etc. And then my „build pipeline was“: I’d FTP the compiled/minified files onto a server (or used DeployHQ to automate that step from a Git repository). That was it. It wasn’t elegant, not client independent, it certainly wouldn’t have worked for a big team, but it was fast, reliable, neat and relatively robust.
Is this still a viable way to work with WordPress projects or should I, a GUI guy, who mainly knows CSS, PHP and JS by working with WordPress pre-Gutenberg, really look into Docker (and unfortunately for me terminal/config file) based development environments like wp-env?
Thank you for any suggestions … and reading my TED talk. 😬
[ad_2]