Tools I Use to Create Premium WordPress and Ghost Themes
At Aspire Themes, I use a lot of tools to help me create WordPress, Ghost and Jekyll themes. Tools will range from development, design, services, hosting and automation tools for making my life easier as a one man shop, and It might be helpful for someone else in a way or another starting their journey as a theme creator or a developer; so I’m so happy to share them with you.
Mamp
I use Mamp to run my development WordPress installation on Mac, it’s very easy to use and I use the free version and it did what I need.
Bitnami
This service is just awesome, I use the Ghost Stack to install Ghost locally. This saves a lot of time and headache installing Ghost, and by using it, we I avoid issues like Node.js versions conflicts and issues regarding npm installation and other infinite numbers of issues. The Bitnami stack provides a one-click install solution for Ghost, and with a few minutes, you will have Ghost installed and ready for working.
Visual Studio Code
I used to use Sublime before, but after I discovered Visual Studio Code, I switched to it from the first usage, it’s very fast, smooth, huge community with lots of extensions and gets updates regularly, and I totally recommend checking it out.
iTerm + tmux
iTerm is a replacement to Mac terminal, and I think most of you are using it for Mac.
tmux is a terminal multilpexer and a pretty great tool.
What is a terminal multiplexer? It lets you switch easily between several programs in one terminal, detach them (they keep running in the background) and reattach them to a different terminal. And do a lot more.
It saves a lot of time by letting you focus on one terminal, create more sessions and more windows as you need on that session, very flexible and will change the way you work with the terminal.
BashScript
I wrote a post explaining how I use BashScript to automate theme deployment to remote servers, which is a time saver for me, especially on testing themes while doing development.
Git
Git should be one of the first things to learn as a developer. Currently, I use the git-flow workflow which is a great way to organize and manage the way I work with branches, adding new features, fixing bugs, .. etc
BitBucket
By using Git it’s very important to host all the themes and work on a remote server like GitHub or BitBucket. I use BitBucket to host my work as it’s a free option with unlimited private repositories.
Pixelmator
Pixelmator is a great image editor for Mac, I use it all the time to create themes preview images, and any image customization I need. Pixelmator costs about $30.
Trello
Trello is a very good tool for managing many things, a column for different blog system with a card for every theme to attach the new to do, issues, and everything related to that theme.
I also use it for managing design inspiration for different places, and when I have an idea of a new theme, I create a separate column with different inspiration links for different patterns. Simply, it’s my place of everything whether it’s planning, to do, resources or ideas.
iOS Simulator
A few weeks ago I received an email from a client who purchased the Magaz Ghost theme and found an issue on iPad regarding the posts grid on the home page. I tried to debug the issue on the Chrome dev tools as I don’t have an iPad, but I wasn’t able to reproduce the issue. I remembered that I have tried the iOS Simulator that comes with Xcode; so I opened the simulator and picked iPad Device from the Hardware menu, and now I can see the issue.
The great thing about the Simulator is that I can test the web page natively on different devices and also debug with Safari dev tools and this is a big win for using the iOS Simulator.
Gulp
Gulp is a JavaScript task runner that could save a lot of time while developing themes, and it’s one of the most important tools I use, for assets automation, I use it with Sass, JavaScipt, and everything that I think I do repeat a lot and I should automate it instead.
I also use it to generate the rtl.css file that is used for WordPress RTL sites, you can read more about this in a post I wrote before.
You can check a real example of a gulpfile.js I use at GitHub.
Sass
Sass is a powerful tool for writing modular and organized CSS, organizing the source code into components, sections, and variables make life easier for developers instead of one big file of CSS, using variables, mixins, and other features will change the way you write raw CSS.
Recently I started using ITCSS as an architecture for writing CSS, and I highly recommend it. I created this awesome-list for articles, videos, and code examples, you can also take a look at Aspire Themes website code as an example.
WordPress Tools
For better WordPress development and for getting great results and to make sure themes are coded with best practices and validated, there are some plugins and tools that are essentials in my workflow.
Developer Plugin: This is the first plugin to install to check and optimize the development environment for tools and plugins that will help you develop better themes with a better quality.
RTL Tester: If you support RTL, then this plugin is a must as it tests themes in RTL mode.
Theme Check: To make sure that the theme is compatible with WordPress standards, this is an amazing plugin to be in your arsenal.
Theme Unit Test: Which generates some dummy content data for testing all kinds of content. I also recommend you to add some real content with good looking images that feels like a content other than unreadable text like Lorem Ipsum.
The Monster Widget: This plugin will add all core widgets to the sidebar for testing, which is perfect for optimizing widget styles in different places, so if you support widgets in the footer make sure to activate this widget there to make sure that all widgets styles are looking as you want in different places.
ManageWP: A great online tool to manage WordPress websites from one dashboard, I use it mainly to update plugins for themes demos, which saves me lots of time opening every site to do the updates.
Hosting
An important thing about creating premium themes is to create a complete demo site for the theme, and of course, you need a hosting service for creating a demo for every single theme, I have tried several options and here are the ones I currently use.
DigitalOcean
I use DigitalOcean to host WordPress and Ghost themes. For WordPress, I created a Droplet and connected it with the awesome ServerPilot service, which makes creating WordPress sites as speed as a rocket. Currently, I host all WordPress demos (5 demos) on one $5 Droplet.
I also host 5 Ghost demos on one 5$ Droplet, this absolutely saves a lot of time and energy managing all the instances if they are in separate droplets, plus it is a very cost effective.
You can read about how to host multiple instances in the following article.
Netlify
I use Netlify to host Jekyll themes and I can say that it’s the one that I was looking for, very developer friendly and integrated with different other apps like BitBucket and GitHub.
It’s very easy to setup with Jekyll or any static website, just link your repository and you are done, and everyone you push a new update to the remote repo, Netlify will build the website automatically for you with a free domain name which you can change later to a custom domain.
Jekyll
I use Jekyll for Aspire Themes website which includes several sections like the blog, documentations, about, and the themes page with a separate page for every theme. The source code is available on GitHub.
Jekyll is very flexible in the way you can structure your site as needed and all is done in text, no databases, no queries, just a simple markup language and markdown files — which we love as developers — and then you can host the site for free on GitHub Pages.
I also use Netlify for deployment, and with a few minutes, you can also add a free SSL certificate to the website.
I will write a post about how I built the website and how the structure is going.
Namecheap
I started to use Namecheap recently and I like their services and the web dashboard interface is very understandable and easy to use. They also provide a great online customer support, and I recommend them if you are looking to buy a new domain.
I hope you find the post useful exploring a new tools and tips that I use on a day to day work, that will help you start your next theme shop or even use them in your daily development workflow. Let me know if there any tools you can recommend if you are a theme author or a developer, also if you have any questions, I would be happy to discuss them with you.
