On Sunday at WordCamp Phoenix I led an unconference session with a few awesome WordPress developers to find out what tools we all use. The list is impressive and so I compiled it here.
Servers
- Nginx
- Lighttpd
ApacheA The recommendation from, well, just about all developers is to drop Apache as soon as possible for one of the other web servers
Text Editors
Hardware
- Present: Six Mac laptops, Two laptops running Windows, one person who primarily uses Linux
- External Monitors
- Magic Trackpad
- Mechanical Keyboard
Command Line Tools
- Ack (vs. Grep) for searching through core
- SSH
- ab (Apache Benchmark)
- htop, top
Development Environments
Support Tickets
Version Control
- SVN (Pretty much only to interact with WordPress core, plugin, or theme repositories
- Git (Pretty much only because of Github)
- Mercurial
- Capistrano deployment tool
- Bitbucket
- RepositoryHosting.com
- Github post receive hooks
- WordPress Github Plugin Updater
- Versions
- Tower
- Github For Mac
- Gitx
Freelancer Billing Tools
Online Tools
- Regex Pal
- Reggy
- Dabblet
- Stripe (developer friendly payment solution)
- WordPress Plugin: Carrington Build
Debugging
- Firebug
- Chrome Developer Tools
- Debug Bar (WP Plugin)
- Debug Bar Extendeder (Variable Tracing)
- Debug Bar Console (PHP Console in Debug Bar)
CSS Tools
Other
- UI Stencils (for hand-drawn wireframes)
- Gridbooks (for hand-drawn wireframes)
- More clients
- Less sleep
Many thanks to everyone who attended the session and contributed to this list. Sound off in the comments if we missed something that makes your WordPress development life easier.
I’m ashamed that no Mac users suggested SourceTree: http://sourcetreeapp.com/
Wonderful FREE GUI for git, SVN and Hg.
Thanks for throwing it out there! It seemed from the discussion that most of us, for day to day commands ended up using the command line.
Thanks for running the session, Taylor. I got a lot out of it. Thanks, too, for posting all the notes.
Absolutely! Thanks for coming, was nice to meet you