The following are tools we use at WisdmLabs. This list will grow and change over time and is not meant to be comprehensive. Generally, we encourage or require these tools to be used in favor of other ones. Rules governing tools to be used and packaged with a client site will be much stricter than those used on internal projects.
At WisdmLabs, we use LocalWP to build and interact with local environments that match production as closely as possible. There are many setups and configurations available.
LocalWP - A local WordPress development tool. This tool helps you fastly setup local WordPress websites with desired PHP version, WordPress version and server configuration.
Learn how to setup LocalWP here.
Grunt - Grunt is a task runner built on Node that lets you automate tasks like Sass preprocessing and JS minification. Grunt is our default task runner and has a great community of plugins and solutions we use for on company and client projects.
Gulp - Gulp is also a task runner build on Node that offers a similar suite of plugins and solutions to Grunt. The biggest difference is Gulp allows you direct access to the stream of information from your source files and allows you to modify this data directly.
Webpack - Webpack is a bundler for JS/CSS. It’s extremely useful when building larger JavaScript applications (i.e. React.js).
Composer - We use Composer for managing PHP dependencies. Usually everything we need is bundled with WordPress, but sometimes we need external PHP libraries like “Patchwork”. Composer is a great way to manage those external libraries.
When a WordPress install is managed and maintained by an engineering team, and when the infrastructure supports it, plugins in a WordPress project can be easily managed using Composer. WordPress Packagist provides a Composer repository that mirrors all public WordPress plugins and themes.
Git - At WisdmLabs we use Git for version control. We encourage people to use the command line for interacting with Git. GUIs are permitted but will not be supported internally.
This tool covers the basics of Git.
WP-CLI - A command line interface for WordPress. This is an extremely powerful tool that allows us to do imports, exports, run custom scripts, and more via the command line.
WP-CLI is easy to setup using these steps.
A list of WP-CLI commands can be found here.
We can use a variety of tools to test our sites for accessibility issues. WebAim has some great resources on how to evaluate sites with a screen reader.
There are a few browser tools that lend us a hand when it comes to testing areas like color contrast, heading hierarchy, and ARIA application.