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 coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. 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.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://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 JavaScriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/. 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 TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress., 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 CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. 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 PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20, JSJS JavaScript, a web scripting language typically executed in the browser. Often used for advanced user interfaces and behaviors., 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 WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. 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.