Before getting to the heart of the matter, it's important to understand the concept of workflow that I would translate into a workflow. Concretely, it corresponds more to your way of working, your habits, your methods and the tools you use to carry out a WordPress project.
If I speak to you today, it is because the workflow is essential for website development. Some features to describe a best workflow are:
Efficiency: It is the ratio between the speed and the quality of the work done. A best workflow will allow you to work very quickly while maintaining a high level of quality.
Comfort: Having a workflow is best — a workflow with which you feel comfortable is better. Do not hold yourself in a work environment with which you are not comfortable. However, no one is comfortable from the first minutes with new tools. Do not steer! Try a few days or weeks before drawing conclusions.
Consistency: A best workflow is a "universal" workflow that one adapts to any project, allowing to always work the same methods.
You have to find a balance between these three characteristics, and from person to person, there is always one characteristic that stands out more than another. I still want to emphasize that the workflow is something very personal.
Why Have a Best Workflow?
Adopting a best workflow, among other things, makes it possible to work on your skills in an ideal setting, and thus to make them evolve more quickly or at least in a more efficient way. It will serve you in class, during your tests, but especially in professional life. Every WordPress agency has a workflow more or less defined. Being able to say that you know how to register in a workflow and adapt to it is a plus for your WordPress website development.
Without further ado, here are some tools that are part of my personal workflow and with which I learned to work efficiently.
Web Hosting with GitHub
Git, a source code versioning tool, has spread very quickly in the open-source community because of its speed, flexibility and reliability. Git's online hosting solutions are highly successful, but their use often pays off for hosting private projects. GitLab is a free and open source solution for hosting private Git projects comparable to giants such as GitHub and BitBucket and suitable for businesses.
GitHub is slightly different from most code hosting sites in that it uses a namespace for projects. Instead of being primarily project oriented, GitHub is user-oriented. If you do not want to invest in setting up your own GitHub server, there is still an option to choose host with GitHub, such as Cloudways.
Even if you build and run your server internally, you'll probably want to use a public hosting website for your open-source code — this usually makes it easier for the community to access and help.
Elementor Page Builder
The world of page builder for WordPress has evolved over the last 3 years, the majority of premium themes offer a function of this type, either integrated or developed internally or as a premium or free extension.
The goal of a page builder is not to touch the code, to focus on the content and with the help of construction tools; drag and drop to structure the page and therefore its contents. Elementor, in my opinion, is the ideal tool because it integrates live visualization, directly from the front-end of your WordPress website development.
Elementor is a free, scalable and open-source page builder that is faster than its premium and lightweight competitors. It is easy to use and requires no coding. Everything works via drag and drop from the front-end of your WordPress.
Show Current Template
Surprisingly, many developers and designers face difficulties in finding the exact template files that are used to display the page. Thus, making changes to published pages could become a challenge. Show Current Template is a great plugin that displays the current template for a page.
Query Monitor
Query Monitor is a plugin that allows you to debug and analyze the performance of your WordPress such as MySQL queries, hooks, and HTTP requests. It makes it possible to collect all the information necessary for the WordPress development while being practical.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of its features and overall information collected by Query Monitor:
SQL Queries (shows all SQL queries, slow queries, duplicate queries)
Hooks (shows all used hooks, their priorities)
Theme (shows all files, parts, template class used)
PHP Errors
Rewriting Rules
Scripts & Styles
Languages (Shows the language used and the MO files used and whether they are loaded or not)
HTTP Requests
AJAX
REST API
Admin Screen
Environmental Information
Sublime Text Editor
A text editor is a piece of software, working like your word processor program like Microsoft Word or Writer that allows you to write codes. However, it is different from an interpreter or compiler, because it does not allow you to test the code you have written.
There are several text editors available that you can try but for WordPress website development, I strongly recommend Sublime Text 3 because it was designed specifically for that. Available since 2008 and created by Jon Skinner, Sublime Text 3 has several advantages:
It existed in its primitive form for Windows and Mac OS X and currently, it is available under Linux
It offers different syntax highlighting options
It recognizes several languages and others can always be added
The layout is fully customizable
It is lightweight because its executable weighs about 6 MB
Here my mission is over! I hope this article has brought you something. Do not forget that workflow and habits essential to your progress and WordPress development. Take the time to find which tool you prefer to use and give yourself the means to be more effective.
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