There is a reason why I chose WordPress, when I chose WordPress over so many other platforms that were available on my plate. The ease of it and most importantly the community around it. 10+ years and I am still amazed by how great of a community has WordPress had around it and how they manage to take time out of their daily routine and contribute to this project. The reason behind WordPress being the most loved, used and talked about CMS is because of the people behind it who have found a love for giving back to the community that in-turn helps them make their living. Not only the core WordPress but there are also a lot of people working on different smaller things, that will eventually add value to WordPress and how WordPress might plan it’s growth in the future or may be just how it would help WordPress be more fun and easy to use. Today I will discuss 5 such open source WordPress focused projects, that you can follow or contribute to. These are projects that I think are useful and add value. You may have other opinions and opinions are welcome. Let me know if I have missed something that needs to be here and I will more than willingly make the edits to the list or add to the list. Also I haven’t added _s starter theme and plugin boilerplate as they are known to most of us.
So without further adieu, here are 5 WordPress focused open source projects you should keep an eye on.
Sublime-WP-Customizer
Created by Ahmad Awais, this is a package for sublime text editor. What this does is make your favorite sublime more better. With the installation of the, you can write WP Customizer codes without having to write everything. So basically once you start typing, you will have a list of WP Customizer functions suggestion which you can choose from and the rest is handled by the package. The screenshot below should explain it better.
Gutenberg
Something the whole WordPress community has a comment on, be it positive or negative. But everyone awaits it’s inclusion in the core. Right now it serves as beta-plugin and can be downloaded from the WordPress.org plugin repo. Gutenberg will bring frontend ediitng to WordPress (powered by the community). We can expect to have this soon as a core feature since even Matt himself has had his words regarding this. So until it is pushed to core, keep an eye from the repo and of course like others you can contribute to this as well.
Customize Posts
Another project I have been keeping an eye on is Customize Posts.
This is a feature plugin intended to implement #34923: Introduce basic content authorship in the Customizer.
The goal for this plugin is to be able to expose the editing of posts and pages in the Customizer, allowing you to edit post data and postmeta for any number of posts, and preview the changes before saving them for others to see.
WP-Kit
This one is for those who long for OOP and would want to implement the same in their next theme or plugin.This library is created for making WordPress more friendly. Plugin and theme authors can create more reusable components and products by using this library.
Sage starter theme
Sage is a starter theme with modern workflow. Some of the features of Sage are:
- Sass for stylesheets
- ES6 for JavaScript
- Webpack for compiling assets, optimizing images, and concatenating and minifying files
- Browsersync for synchronized browser testing
- Laravel Blade as a templating engine
- Controller for passing data to Blade templates
- CSS framework options
Those were some of the projects that I have had an eye on and have been following. If you feel I have missed out on something, there’s a comment section down there where you can leave a link and I shall take a look and also update the post where and when required.
