WordPress theme development can feel repetitive. At times there are things you are always doing over and over again. This is true when you are building a WordPress theme for distribution. Thankfully there are tools that can make your workflow a bit easier.
Tools
In order to make your theme workflow a little easier we will need a few things.
- Local server
- NodeJS
- Grunt
- Command line comfortability
- Bower ( optional )
- SASS ( optional )
- Version Control System ( optional )
Yes, a few things to set up but when you are building a roller coaster you don’t use just one tool, right? Same applies to building a theme – or even a plugin.
Grunt can make your life easier by taking redundant tasks and automating them. A good example of this is minifying all your files. The big benefit of this of course is a smaller file size but what happens when you have to redo this when you change the main file? You have to re-minify. What if you have more than one file? This can be frustrating because you may have to do this so many times.
This is where Grunt comes in super handy. It helps run repetitive tasks like minifying, copying, and even compressing things for us.