This is a summary about the software and scripts used by PixelGrade team, to develop our WordPress themes and plugins.
In case this is the first time you try to create a “pix theme” or you just did a full format on your PC, this is what you should start to install.
Editors and IDE’s
At PixelGrade, you have the freedom to code with whatever you like and you are productive. So if you know an IDE which helps us to be super fast at coding, please let us know.
Until then we recommend you to install these following apps:
– Sublime Text 3 usually we use it to make quick edits – being a fast editor on opening and very smart at multiple cursors and text finders.
– PHPStorm or the free EAP version is the most powerful IDE and the fastest one we could find at this moment.
Terminal Stuff
First of all, we mainly work with GitHub so you need to have git (and sometimes with svn) installed.
So, about git
– Mac users already have git utility installed but here is a PRO TIP: dotfiles is a script which improves terminal’s view for paths, branches, and modified fields.
– Windows users should install git-scm. Also do not forget to add the git folder into your Environment Variable (the PATH one) like this.
Nodejs
Pretty popular tool if you don’t have it you can install it for Mac / Windows here
NPM
Node package manager, usually comes by default with node, it is used to install cool node modules on your system
Ruby
Simply Ruby. People on Mac be careful about the version of ruby, OS X is coming with an old version of ruby. You can change it with “Ruby Version Manager“
Now that you have ruby you can install ruby gems. These are modules which can be installed with a simple command line this, for example
gem install my-litlte-gem
Compass
gem install compass -v 1.0.0.alpha.18
Sass
gem install sass -v 3.3.0
gulp
Remember NPM? let’s do something with it, install gulp like this
npm install gulp -g
where -g says that the package should be installed globally not only in the current project.
package.json
This file contains a list with all the required npm’s for the current theme.
The beauty of the npm is that you can run
npm install
and all the packages will be downloaded and installed in the current project
Web Environment
AMPPS
Usually we create our web environments with AMPPS. It may be slow on windows so other recommendations would be Winginx (based on Nginx) or WAMP (apache)
Team helpers
Hipchat
This is the software used to communicate, kinda required since we can work remote, you can download it here
FTP Clients
Because sometimes you might want to connect to a server through FTP or SSH
For windows FileZilla
For OS X (free) Cyberduck
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