In a little over a decade, we’ve made twenty five thousand commits to WordPress. WordPress (along with the web itself) has come a long way, but our development workflow has remained largely the same.
As a part 3.7, I’ll be leading an effort to revamp and streamline our development workflow. We’re going to bring all of our core components—our code, our tests, and our tooling—under one roof. Developers will be able to use and improve the tools we’re already working with day-to-day, and we’ll be able to add new tools to make working with WordPress even easier.
We’re also making sure that any changes are compatible with our current workflow, so you won’t have to change the way you work. These changes won’t break any existing checkouts or scripts that use core.svn.wordpress.org. Now that we’ve cleared that up…
develop.svn.wordpress.org
This week, we’re creating a new repository: develop.svn.wordpress.org.
The develop repository will be the new home for all core development. We’re going to sync over all of the commits from core.svn.wordpress.org and will reorganize this new repository to use a new directory structure:
The src directory
This is the WordPress core source. All of the existing WordPress core files will be moved into this directory. You’ll develop and test against this directory as usual, but the real power will come from using the rest of the tools in the repository. The contents will be optimized for development, not production (this means uncompressed files—including our internal libraries).
The tests directory
We’re going to pull our internal unit tests into this repository as well. This will make testing a cinch, and allow us to commit patches that include changes to both the source and the unit tests. We’ll also add JavaScript unit tests during the 3.7 cycle.
The tools directory
Our tools directory will include all of the little things that make our lives as developers easier. To start, we’ll include our internationalization tools, which will allow us to generate pot files from within core. We’ll also include a handful of scripts that some of us use to interact with Trac, like scripts to upload and apply patches.
The root directory
This frees up the root directory to include configuration files, allowing WordPress to interact more seamlessly with other applications and services like Travis CI and Composer.
A build process
We’ve had an implicit build process in the WordPress codebase for a considerable time now. Most of that process is now contained within bumpbot, a little script that lives on the WordPress.org servers. Whenever we update CSS or JavaScript files, bumpbot comes around, minifies them, and commits the result. Despite bumpbot’s efforts, this process is less than ideal. Our source files (in this case, JavaScript and CSS) live alongside our production-optimized files, which causes confusion and makes contributing to core considerably more difficult. Our built output—the files optimized for machines—shouldn’t live alongside the source code that’s optimized for developers, and beyond that, shouldn’t be tracked in source control.
We’re adopting Grunt to write a real build process and help us manage and run our various tools. Grunt is a JavaScript task runner that has a robust ecosystem of plugins focused around building modern web applications. We can include tools such as integrated testing, minification, linting (for PHP, JS, and CSS), image optimization, and LiveReload—and that’s just the beginning.
Using Grunt will be an optional but encouraged part of WordPress development. These tools are all built atop Node.js, which Grunt needs in order to function.
So what’s happening to core.svn.wordpress.org?
In a word, nothing. The contents of the core repository have always been optimized for production, and that’s not going to change. core.svn.wordpress.org will now serve as the repository for our built output: every time we make a commit that changes the build, the core build will be updated with a corresponding commit. As mentioned earlier, scripts and checkouts will continue to function as expected. When you download a zip of WordPress, it will still be generated from this repository.
Let’s get started
The develop repository will go live soon. For now, I’ve made a preparatory repository available to illustrate the structure I’ve described above, and allow us to experiment with this new workflow. You can learn more about how the tools are installed and used on the repository page. Please provide feedback on this post—the goal is not to build all of the code there first, but to provide insight into the new process.
Lastly, I’d like to say thank you to all of the contributors who helped shape this idea over the past few months, especially at WordCamp San Francisco’s hack day. Together, we’ve created a structure that elegantly addresses many of our existing problems and opens the door to countless possibilities for better development practices.
Ryan Bayne 3:27 pm on August 13, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Great. Looking forward to the code editor improvement. While I’m still learning the core and the ways of WordPress. Things like that will make it just a little easier to take it all in and eventually contribute, eventually
Shea Bunge 9:40 pm on August 13, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I recommend that you use CodeMirror for the code editor.