Chris WiegmanWe write a lot of plugins at work. On average I seem to build one or two a month myself and I’m one of a team of developers working on our site. With that much code getting built keeping all that code maintainable can be quite a chore. To make that chore a bit easier I’ve introduced the team to WordPress coding standards and other tools but it can still be a challenge to keep all the plugins organized.
Enter Yeoman
Yeoman is a scaffolding tool I was first introduced to during my tenure at 10up who used it in a very similar fashion as what I needed. It creates a WordPress plugin that can be activated and comes complete with a Grunt build for handling assets, a base for PHP unit tests and enough other standards and tools to completely remove the burden of spinning up a project from our developers.
Now, instead of starting each plugin from scratch, we simply type yo wp:plugin, answer a few questions such as the name of the plugin, the plugin description and other basic information and we’re ready to start developing in a scaffold complete with all the tools to help make sure the code is both well organized and of top quality.
Looking to do something similar yourself? We’ve shared our code on GitHub. Take a look and feel free to use it as a base for your own plugins.