Tonik — WordPress starter theme with CLI, ES6, Webpack and more

by patrulo • 9 years ago

52 54 9 years ago

mandazi• 9 years ago

Cool. I'll check this out.

One thing I really find myself having a hard time working with WordPress themes is that many of them are bloated and require so many plugins. The amount of css/js files that are required to load a page in a premium WordPress theme averages around 30+ files (at least from what I have seen working with WordPress themes).

tyingq3• 9 years ago

The amount of css/js files that are required to load a page in a premium WordPress theme averages around 30+ files

HTTP/2 alleviates most of this, but there are plugins that can concatenate and minify css/js. It is a shame though that most of the attractive themes are so bloated.

ajohnclark• 9 years ago

Autoptimize is a good one

chrisan• 9 years ago

It is a shame though that most of the attractive themes are so bloated.

The target audience just doesn't care (or dont even know). Theme authors want to solve as many problems as possible to increase the chances someone buys their theme. It's in their best interest to sell something with everything but the kitchen sink (V5.0 now with kitchen sink!)

Cthulhu_• 9 years ago

A simple (to install) solution for this is Google PageSpeed Module - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/. It's like a proxy in front of your website that will serve optimized / minified / concatenated versions of the theme and such. It inlines small stuff, resizes images where needed, all that good stuff.

I don't have it on my current webserver though, I'm not comfortable manually having to compile nginx, it seems like there's a lot that can go wrong there.

dangerface7• 9 years ago

I keep seeing these projects to make wordpress work more like a cms and I keep thinking why not just use a cms?

austinpray• 9 years ago

WordPress is a cms first and foremost.

edit: lol today I learned cms != blog

tyingq3• 9 years ago

I'd say "sort of". It does support custom field types and custom post types. But you have to either write code, or use some 3rd party plugin to manage/use them.

bybjorn• 9 years ago

Why do you then still get a blog when you install it?

zaphar• 9 years ago

No. WordPress is a blogging platform. A CMS is much more than that. If you need a CMS you probably want something more than WordPress.

dangerface7• 9 years ago

wordpress.org says its a blog in the title, it's the first word.

uzegonemad• 9 years ago

What's your recommendation for an open-source CMS? Preferably one with relatively simple administration that a layman (client) could still comprehend.

cc @tyingq, @zaphar, @bybjorn, @dangerface

lancekey2• 9 years ago

I like Craft CMS[0]. It's very flexible and developer friendly. Great for custom site builds.

[0] https://craftcms.com/

thousande• 9 years ago

If Java is not a hurdle, checkout Enonic CMS, http://enonic.com/

Edit: * Java on the back-end

dangerface7• 9 years ago

Good question. I like perch its quick and easy to build with, I moved from wordpress to perch last year and it has cut development time in half.

It's super flexible no need for dodgy third part plugins that's no longer maintained. Instead of plugins I just build everything I need custom with the tools perch provides, I end up with something thats perfect for the client and its a lot faster than trying to modify some third party plugin.

Clients are initially scared of perch, they want wordpress because thats what they are used to and "thats what every one else uses". Five minutes into their perch training their attitude is "This is great. Why does every one else use wordpress?".

Sure its not free like wordpress but its only £50 and its worth every penny, you will easily make that money back in development costs in a day.

https://grabaperch.com/

ralphfourdigits• 9 years ago

We love Wagtail CMS (https://wagtail.io/) It's a free, beautiful, versatile and fast Django (Python) based CMS.

Check out the sites which are made with wagtail at madewithwagtail.org

cheers, ralph

laktek• 9 years ago

If you're interested in trying something new - request for an invite at https://pragma.build

You can read more about the project here - https://www.laktek.com/2016/11/29/introducing-pragma/. We'll be sending out more beta invites in the next couple of weeks.

thestepafter• 9 years ago

Statamic is absolutely fantastic. Great features and functionality that allows for you to easily extend and customize as needed.

claudiulodro2• 9 years ago

WordPress: easy to use, documentation and tutorials are available everywhere, you don't generally have to train clients to use it, etc.

You can go with a niche CMS if you want, but WordPress is the most popular for a reason.

FlipperPA2• 9 years ago

I've used WordPress for years. It's great for a simple blog, but not any kind of complex CMS, IMHO. After adding a few plugins, maintaining it is a nightmare; and I won't get into the database design underneath.

Another vote for Wagtail: my team has moved to it and have found it to be wonderful. It is the first time our tech, content, UX and marketing teams all agree on a CMS being wonderful. Streamfield is an absolutely killer feature. Our writers love the editor interface, which was clearly designed by and for content creators, and not by a bored developer like me.

Check out Wagtail. It takes a little bit more planning to get started, but wow, does it pay off in the long run.

It is truly free and open-source, released under the BSD license.

SephoD• 9 years ago

Wagtail (www.wagtail.io) all the way. We at Overcast use this for all our clients, ranging from small sites with a couple of pages to enterprise sites with thousands of pages. Very simple but very powerful admin interface and treads the line very nicely between simplicity for programmer vs simplicity for the end user.

garethsprice• 9 years ago

It's simple, non-tech admin staff are familiar with the interface (and can be easily trained), there's a vast ecosystem of plugins and integrations for it, it's easy to hire people or teams who have experience working with it. WP has its flaws and an upper limit to what it's capable of, but it's often a very pragmatic choice for small to medium sized content-driven websites.

lj32• 9 years ago

I hear this a lot, but I've found it to be untrue. When I used to do wordpress development, a large part of my job was to customize admin pages so the non-tech staff could actually use it. The default wordpress admin interface leaves a lot to be desired.

fimdomeio• 9 years ago

I started separating the admin from the "theme" by using the wordpress rest api (admin running in a subdomain). While this might seem overkill at first but I find that there's a lot less documentation to read and I can reuse a lot more code from other projects without any changes.

bluetidepro• 9 years ago

Do you have any detailed notes on how you set this up? I haven't used WP in a long time, to be honest, so not sure how their rest api works? Is it straight forward? Would love to read about this setup you do, sounds great.

rmccue• 9 years ago

The REST API is included with WordPress 4.7+ and on by default. Docs here: https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/ (if you find anything missing, I'd love to know)

Already__Taken• 9 years ago

Most of my WP sites don't do a lot. Can you use the rest API to handle the contact form and search? that was I could just use a static generation from wp itself. The wp admin wouldn't even need to be publically accessible then.

sanat• 9 years ago

The WP API handle search but not contact forms. Most plugins still don't provide you with an API.

Contact form 7's latest build has them using their own API - but it's still undocumented.

yellowboxtenant• 9 years ago

I can't picture developing WP themes without WP_Query class. Does that ever pose a problem for you?

_neil• 9 years ago

I love using the rest API like this. The main downside is you lose the inability to use many Wordpress plugins.

I.e., if your users want to insert a poll into a page, before you could probably install a plugin that integrates with the editor and admin panel. With this approach, you'll (probably) need to build that functionality yourself. So, your content and users need to be just right to do this.

joe_momma• 9 years ago

I like it, neat that NPM is used

gibbitz• 9 years ago

I built a custom gulpfile that uses composer to manage the updating of WP and plugins along with building and FTP transfer a while back that I've been using for about a year. I should have built a swanky page and open-sourced it then :(. Composer sure makes WP development much easier to integrate with build systems. This is totally the way to go as long as clients prefer using WP to something more full-featured or server intensive. I'll have to check this out when I decide that webpack has some advantage over gulp/rollup. Right now I'm able to get smaller packages and do more easier with gulp, so I'm in no hurry.

ezekg• 9 years ago

This looks pretty cool. A couple years back, I built a similar starter theme and CLI package for WP dev. Back then CoffeeScript and Grunt were the norm, so it's a bit outdated now. But the CLI actually grew from a scaffold like you have now, to being able to deploy over SSH using Capistrano, database and all, which was really nice.

I don't do much WP dev anymore (thankfully moved to using Rails, Go and Node), but when I do I usually use that old project for deployment. I'll be sure to check this out, as the services architecture looks like a nice change of pace. I tried Bedrock/Sage in the past, but it was just too much for me and made some things harder than they should be.

Added links to my old projects below in case anybody is curious,

[0] https://github.com/themejuice/tj (CLI) [1]: https://github.com/themejuice/sprout (theme)

Tonik — WordPress starter theme with CLI, ES6, Webpack and more

Related Stories