As a professional working on WordPress sites, I wanted to share what are the tools that I use on my day to day WordPress Development and Management tasks, I hope these tools will make your life easier, as they did to me, so without further comments, let’s begin:
Chrome Developer Tools
It’s incredible that many people who do WordPress sites are not aware of how useful your Chrome browser is. Google has made very great things with it and Dev Tools is a biggest part of it. You can find Javascript errors, see HTTP headers, do performance analysis and much much more. Its an essential part of what I use to diagnose issues with websites.
Website: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJR-n8szgBc
wp-cli: Command Line Interface for WordPress
If you are a console lover like me, you’d appreciate this tool very very much. wp-cli is a terminal application built on PHP, that allows you executing a lot of wordpress management tasks such as updating & install plugins, adding users, password resets, etc and everything from the comfort of your favorite shell environment (I use and ❤ Oh my zsh). It requires you to have a unix like environment and PHP installed.
Website: http://wp-cli.org/
Twitter: @wpcli
GitHub: https://github.com/wp-cli/wp-cli
YouTube: WP-CLI – A Practical Guide For The Rest of Us WordCamp
Wocker: Docker for WordPress
Wocker is a rapid development environment for WordPress. It’s based on Docker. It works on Linux and Mac. Since I am using a Mac, it made my life easier as I don’t need to setup Apache and MySQL each time I have to setup a new WordPress boilerplate! (AWESOME)
This allows you a great way to locally develop a site and then you can migrate it over to your web host using any of the available methods!
Author: Kite Koga (@ixkaito)
Website: http://wckr.github.io/
YouTube Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3OAm7qMeic
Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/kaitokoga9/wocker-create-a-wordpress-development-environment-in-seconds
WordPress Codex
One thing I love the most about WordPress its all the documentation is available online, and codex @ wordpress.org is the best online resource for anything wordpress documentation, whether you are starting or you need a quick reference about any function of the CMS. +1 to Automatic for making such an awesome resource online available to us all.
Website: https://codex.wordpress.org/
The IDE: PHPStorm by JetBrains vs SublimeText
I know this is a very personal decision for each one of you, but to me PhpStorm is better than SublimeText when it comes to being a real IDE. Sure SublimeText has a lot (I seriously mean A LOT) of plugins that extend its functionality, but PHPStorm comes with everything I need from scratch.
Download PHPStorm: https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/
PHPStorm & WordPress Tutorial: WordPress Development using PhpStorm
Download SublimeText: http://sublimetext.com/
SublimeText & WordPress tutorial: Setting Up Sublime Text for WordPress Development
Conclusion
This are the tools that I use and work for me, let me know if I missed other tool that you use on your daily tasks that simplify your work with WordPress. I would love to learn new tools!
