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

 

My personal suggestions

Evernote if you want to remember things