What I really want is to be able to download a word press theme and have it magically applied to my rails app or have some plugin that let's me do this.
Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.
21–30 of 87 posts
Re: Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.
#22This looks really like what I needed, it looks awesome!
Re: Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.
#23If you're going to use all the new hip tools (and take the time to learn how to use them), just go one step farther and stop using Wordpress.
I'm not a Wordpress fan, but for better or worse, there are Wordpress plugins that do many, many things. For certain sets of needs, you can just grap WP and several plugins, throw them together with a half decent theme and you're done. I don't advocate that, because I enjoy craftsmanship and elegant solutions, but some businesses can be built in weeks, not months, using WP at very low cost--maybe the cost of the theme--if you're smart enough to put the pieces together yourself (you are).
Re: Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.
#24I'm not a Ruby developer, so I can't comment if this makes it easier for someone who lives in both Rails and Wordpress, but as someone who has to occasionally make a custom Wordpress theme and has no experience in Rails, this looks like a lot of complexity just to put together a theme. However, I could see this being very nice for someone whose time consists mostly of Wordpress themes, and you obviously put a lot of…
ceol, that's almost correct. you need to keep the plugin also on your production server, but the compiled assets gets "baked", so wordpress just serves static files.
Re: Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.
#25If you're going to use all the new hip tools (and take the time to learn how to use them), just go one step farther and stop using Wordpress.
Wordpress is far and away superior to any blogging platform available on Ruby. It makes wonderful sense to write Wordpress templates in a somewhat more productive environment than raw PHP, then compile them down into something which requires no dependencies on the actual server. This gets you all of the many, many benefits of Wordpress (great plugin support! huge community! deploys at any commodity web host! SQL vulnerabilities patched weekly+!) while having your template development not hindered by copious amounts of spaghetti code.
It is also big news to folks who write a lot of templates, because something like this allows them to create a toolchain which spits out WP templates, as opposed to having to e.g. having a template framework that templates are built against. This means that they can do across-the-board updates much more easily. That's a huge win if, for example, you're a company that publishes 100+ templates and somebody reports an XSS vulnerability in a commonly repeated component of one of them. (I don't know if their other 99 templates are patched yet so I won't go pointing fingers, but suffice it to say this happened.)
+ Kidding, kidding. OK, mostly kidding.
Re: Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.
#26I feel this is solving a problem that doesn't exist. The problem with creating a WordPress theme isn't that it's missing buzzwordy tech like HAML, SASS and CoffeeScript. The problem is that the PHP behind WordPress is hideous. Even in version 3.x If someone were to fork WordPress and fix all the spaghetti code, then I could stop writing themes like it was 1998...
I've dived in the Wordpress codebase a few times, I think it wouldn't be very hard to rewrite major parts. However, I don't think you can fix much without breaking tons of plugins, themes and 3rd party tools that integrate with Wordpress.
And if you are going to break the plugin ecosystem, might as well use Habari, which is much nicer: http://habariproject.org/en/
Too bad all the available plugins fit in a single page: http://wiki.habariproject.org/en/Available_Plugins
Re: Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.
#27LOL. Why not just go the whole hog and run wordpress inside ruby, using tenderlove's Phuby bridge/adapter/thing. https://github.com/tenderlove/phuby Demo of him actually using this to run wordpress inside rack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXERy8Y2eVo Or, you know, spend a day knocking together your own blog in rails. I guess it could be good if you are wedded to a preexisting client base which demands wordpress, e…
I'll quote Wynn Netherland on a post about his take on the very same problem:
"I'm a Rubyist. But I'm also a pragmatic front-end developer. When I have to write a full-stack solution, I pick Rails or Sinatra because writing Ruby is a joy and the Ruby ecosystem is so darn cool. But when I have to create a CMS-based site for myself or a client I love the usability and community behind WordPress. Although I can reluctantly lay Ruby aside when I extend WordPress, I really miss my syntactically awesome stylesheets. Until now."
http://wynnnetherland.com/journal/sass-up-your-wordpress-the...
Re: Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.
#28Although I've built WP themes and have "dabbled" in Rails (building a blog like everyone else) and consider myself more of a front-end guy, this seems like overkill to me.
Not to mention most designers I know would look at this and roll their eyes.
Re: Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.
#29I would love to hear some comments from you. I think this really speeds up custom Wordpress theme creation.
Does this plugin generate standalone themes or do they depend on the plugin?
Wordless, at its core, is just a big set of helper methods, plus a way to compile SASS/Coffeescript without the need to open a terminal, plus the embedded Phampl library to write views. So yes, the theme depends on the plugin, just like any other Wordpress plugin.
Re: Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.
#30I'm not a Ruby developer, so I can't comment if this makes it easier for someone who lives in both Rails and Wordpress, but as someone who has to occasionally make a custom Wordpress theme and has no experience in Rails, this looks like a lot of complexity just to put together a theme. However, I could see this being very nice for someone whose time consists mostly of Wordpress themes, and you obviously put a lot of…
ceol, that's almost correct. you need to keep the plugin also on your production server, but the compiled assets gets "baked", so wordpress just serves static files.
Gotcha. Thanks for your reply. Do you have any plans to include some sort of "conversion" functionality that turns Wordless themes into standalone themes that dont' require the Wordless plugin? I could see a lot of people who make and sell Wordpress themes using this like crazy, but the dependency might turn away most of them.