WordPress Development (coming from Drupal)

Great questions, and thanks for coming to explore the WP side of the force with such an open mind — “My CMS can beat up your CMS” stuff gets so boring, no matter which side you’re on!

I suggest hooking up with your local WP community — there are local WordPress meetups all over the place, and WordCamps somewhere just about every weekend. Unfortunately, I think you just missed the annual WordCamp in your city (if I’m reading your website right!), but the meetup there seems to be pretty regular. WP meetups vary from networking to hands-on hacking days to formal teaching presentations; each one is a little different when it comes to the topics they choose, but they’re a great place to meet people in person, especially when you’re new to the community.

If you do IRC, the main #wordpress channel is a mix of general user/site builder support and plugin/theme discussions.

#wordpress-dev is reserved for core development only, but it’s an active and friendly dev channel. Even if you’re not planning to go really hardcore, you might stop in to lurk just to see how things happen. We just hit beta 1 for the next release, so there’s almost always something going on there.

Several of the sub-teams also have channels, although the activity there varies really wildly: for example #wordpress-ui is used very regularly, whereas the theme review team’s channel only really picks up when there’s a team meeting happening there.

The Get Involved tab at the top of this page leads to the team blogs for all of those teams. Most of them also have a regular IRC meeting time that you can find there, and whatever projects are underway related to those areas — for instance, the core blog hosts the Core Contributor Handbook, which can tell you a lot about code standards, best practices, etc, even if you’re not planning on contributing patches. The support team is working on an up-to-date user manual… but my main point is, if you’re looking for an overview of what goes on and how things are organized, all of those are a great place to get a good feel for what projects are going on, and you’ll start recognizing names and faces before long.

Planet has some great stuff in it, and it’ll also get you some key things like the official Dev Blog (for release announcements and the like), but there are plenty of very active community people who aren’t in there — like any planet-style blog, a lot depends on who submitted their site to be included. For day-to-day stuff, I probably get more news/links/stuff from WP friends on Twitter than anywhere else (mixed with ample time-wasting and goofiness).

For day-to-day stuff, I probably get more news/links/stuff from WP friends on Twitter than anywhere else (mixed with ample time-wasting and goofiness).

Same here—probably a bit too much of the time-wasting, of course!

Thanks for your informative reply, it really does help. I’ll look into the local WP group, and hopefully make a few events. I already have a few friends on Facebook and Twitter who are pretty much exclusively WP-oriented, so I’ll try squeezing them for information too.

One thing I’ve noticed from the start is that WordPress is a lot more designer/OCD-friendly on the front-end than Drupal (bonus!), but a bit less developer friendly under the hood—but not horribly so.

Do you know if there are any initiatives to move away from SVN at some point with plugin repositories?

One thing I’ve noticed from the start is that WordPress is a lot more designer/OCD-friendly on the front-end than Drupal (bonus!), but a bit less developer friendly under the hood—but not horribly so.

Yeah, that’s probably a fair assessment — I actually find WP plenty dev-friendly, but then I’m a whole lot more used to developing in WP than Drupal; then again, I also know designers who are happy as clams theming with Drupal… in the end, a lot of the difference comes down to which choices/styles/habits you get used to.

Do you know if there are any initiatives to move away from SVN at some point with plugin repositories?

For the offical plugin repo, I expect we’ll stay on SVN as long as WP itself does — and there are no plans to change that. Sigh.

For your own development process, there’s no reason not to use git if you prefer it — there are a ton of developers out there who do all of their actual work on git, either locally or on github, and then use git-svn to push out the final release for the repo.

A couple of good workflow writeups for you:

https://markjaquith.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/developing-on-wordpress-using-git/

https://teleogistic.net/2011/05/revisiting-git-github-and-the-wordpress-org-plugin-repository/

https://teleogistic.net/2012/09/using-git-locally-for-a-subversion-based-project-like-buddypress/

Yeah, I’m using Git-SVN for now, but it’s such a pain. Everything moves glacially, even though I’m just trying to push up a small change or just rebase… Even if not Git, something distributed would be nice ??

Thanks for your help!

It’s been a fun conversation — you’re welcome and good luck!