Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.

The available tools for WordPress right now are just awful. I'm doing plugin development right now (but will get to themes in a couple of months); and in order to setup unit testing it took me a full 3 days.

When coding plug-ins, I noticed that I'm using awful and very old patterns (like mixing PHP with HTML). It's like I'm working on PHP when I was 15 years old. Checking a few WordPress plug-ins (popular and premium ones), it even proved to be worse: They were using procedural code and patterns. Huge and long code, a bunch of functions with long names binding to WordPress actions or filters.

Here are the improvements that I'm looking for (and working on):

1. Better Unit Testing: A better stack for Unit Testing.

2. Better debugging: Debugging is just a nightmare when doing WordPress development and your project (I'm using Netbeans) should point to your plug-in repository.

3. Developers plug-in: A plug-in to manage your WordPress install

4. Bootstrap plug-in: Administration interfaces (styles/tables/forms/buttons...)

EDIT: I just noticed that the following

  Include the assets in your Haml views using include_javascript() helper.

  = include_javascript("application")
  This will produce the following HTML, pointing to the assets/javascripts directory:

  

First off, these languages help you write faster, and more efficiently. They mostly take a lot of the repetition and mental strain out of writing code. In my experience with LESS I'm always able to do things faster and don't have to remember color names or keep track of certain styles that I repeat many times especially if they include vendor prefixes.

Then once you've "compiled" the code it's the same as if you were to write it normally. Some may say "so what's the point then?" but again I must repeat that you are able to work more efficiently and still have yourself normal, totally compatible CSS, js, or HTML.

As far as performance goes, there really is no loss in performance as your abstracted code is compiled to the everyday kind with option to minify it too. I use LESS for all ky styling and on my Mac I use either Less.app or CodeKit which automatically detects changes to my .less files and compiles them on the fly to normal .css ones. The source of every page always asks for normal .css files and I really don't have to do any extra work besides making sure the app outputs my stylesheets in the right folder. As a bonus, CodeKit also minifies most languages, detects and syntax errors, and does some image optimization. On my Linux box, I just run a quick terminal command and the compiling takes a couple seconds. Barely any extra work at all.

The only time I'd see ant performance issues is if you were doing client or server side parsing/compiling of these abstraction languages in production. For example, you can use less.js and have your .less files linked in your HTML and it'll turn it into CSS on the fly. That would be a problem. Otherwise, as long as you're taking your HAML, CoffeeScript, LESS/SASS/SCSS, and whatever else and converting it to everyday js, CSS, and HTML then you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

I used to believe like you that these superset languages were just a novelty and had no truly useful purpose. Then I tried LESS and still thought it was lame for a short time (I only grasped the concept of variables and thought the only benefit was being able to name colors) until I really understood it and now I can't live without it. Give one of these a try and I think you'll appreciate them.

Edit: I understand that not all of these work the same. For those that require server or client side parsing with no option to convert prior to production then you have a point. But most of these abstracted, superset languages can be compiled to normal CSS/HTML/js before production and those are the ones that are truly beneficial.

I'm mainly an HTML and CSS guy, and know a healthy amount of PHP.

But I don't know enough to set up a server, databases, write a CMS from scratch (well, maybe I could), and I don't like spending a lot of time in the Terminal. I'm not a programmer.

Even as a designer, I'm able to use WordPress' powerful theming system (which is pretty easy to understand and, in my opinion, not ugly at all) to build out an entire easy-to-use site for a client without having to also hire a developer. The WordPress community is massive and helpful, PHP is well-documented and simple to work with if you know HTML, and you can literally use WordPress to make almost anything on the web. Maybe it would be better theoretically to hire a developer or learn to be one, but I don't like hardcore programming and sometimes just don't need a developer that I have to pay for, wait for, etc.

WordPress, in a way, makes the ability to make simple web apps, dynamic sites, and blogs a more democratic thing; many people can pick enough WP knowledge in a few weeks to do things that would take months or years of programming training.