Time's Important - Let Task Management Save Yours

Time’s ImportantLet Task Management Save Yours

WordCamp Sunshine Coast

James Bundey

@jamesbundey

A bit about meStudied marketing and have 19+ years in marketing roles from development to management and consultancy

Started Creative Approach a small digital marketing agency in Melbourne in 2009

We offer a wide range of services including developing custom WordPress websites

I’ve worked with WordPress for around 6 years

@jamesbundey

So what is task management?

or more accurately what is a task runner

At it’s core it’s simply utilising a JavaScript based task runner to automate the process of repetitive and mundane tasks.

Importantly it provides speed not just in development workflow, but also in performance.

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Who’s it for?Anyone….well almost anyone

It’s easy to get started you don’t need to be a JS genius

You can use a task runner for any number of things

You could use one to automate the generation of a complete WordPress installation

We typically use them to as part of our workflow developing custom WordPress themes

However….

You’re going to have to open the command line

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Why?

Speed and simplicity was a big draw

but,

We found it forced us to honour our workflow and standardise

Improved our file management & version control

Software/platform agnostic

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Most ImportantlyPrevented cowboy coding

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Lets ChooseThe two most common

http://gulpjs.comhttp://gruntjs.com

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Grunt vs GulpBoth are powered by Node, and their ‘npm’ package system and utilise a package.json file.

Grunt focuses on sequential configuration whereas Gulp focusses on pipelines

Grunt is the more mature with more plugins

Gulp is faster due to the way it manages tasks

Really it comes down to whatever works for you

“I found Grunt much easier at the introductory level, but use Gulp for development now”

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@jamesbundey

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Let’s get startedStep 1

Download and install Node - https://nodejs.org

Step 2

Install a task runner (we’re going to use Gulp as our example)

npm install --global gulp-cli

or, if that fails

sudo npm install --global gulp-cli

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Now the WordPress bitTo use the task runner within your theme you need to create two files

package.json

This file will define the details of your project and also the grunt/gulp modules that you will install later as dependencies of it.

Gulpfile.js

This file will load our Gulp plugins and define and configure the tasks we need.

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package.json

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Firstly, install the latest version of either Gulp

npm install --save-dev gulp

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Lets add some pluginsYou can find a whole suite of plugins from either http://gulpjs.com or www.npmjs.com/

For theme development we typically need;

SASS compiling and CSS minification

JS linting, concat, ugilfy

Image minification and preparation

SFTP/FTP deployment

a watch task that’s going to fire the task runner every time we change save our theme (watch is a default task in Gulp, but not in Grunt)

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Again, install in the command line

npm install gulp-sass --save-dev

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Some plugins I’m usinggulp-sassgulp-concatgulp-jshintgulp-uglify gulp-plumbergulp-sourcemapsgulp-utilvinyl-ftp gulp-imageminBrowsersync

https://www.npmjs.com/package/gulp-sass/https://www.npmjs.com/package/gulp-concat/ https://www.npmjs.com/package/gulp-jshint/ https://www.npmjs.com/package/gulp-uglify/ https://www.npmjs.com/package/gulp-plumber/https://www.npmjs.com/package/gulp-sourcemapshttps://www.npmjs.com/package/gulp-util/https://www.npmjs.com/package/vinyl-ftp/ https://www.npmjs.com/package/imagemin/https://www.browsersync.io/docs/gulp/

Plugin pages come with usage code examples

Expect to see something like this in your package.json file

The plugins are saved as devDependencies because they are only needed for development purposes, not to actually run anything.

and this in your theme folder

Importantly, remember to ignore it in git. The plugins shown here amount to 126.7mb of space and 23,526 files. It will kill your repo if you commit it by mistake.

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Get configuringModules are great, but without a Gulpfile.js to run the tasks they’re doing nothing.

Step 1 - Add the modules

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Add some tasks

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Run itAdd the task sequence to the bottom of the Gulpfile.js

Run Gulp in the command line

cd path-to-your-theme

gulp

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What success (hopefully) looks like

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Some other reasonsNo need to include js libraries within your theme and a great way to integrate package management.

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Automatic browser reloading

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Great for ongoing updates via deployment

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Running individual tasks is easy

cd path-to-your-theme

gulp task_name

Simple to share & install once completed

cd path-to-your-theme

npm install

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Useful Linkshttps://markgoodyear.com/2014/01/getting-started-with-gulp/

http://torquemag.io/2015/01/using-grunt-automate-redundant-tasks-wordpress-development/

https://scotch.io/tutorials/automate-your-tasks-easily-with-gulp-js

http://archetyped.com/know/grunt-for-wordpress-plugins/

Thank YouAny Questions?

@jamesbundey