I’ve been using WordPress for a very long time, this site was built in 2004 and I think it was on version 1.2, and was using WordPress from around mid-2003 on other sites before that.
So a long time.
Much has changed, but WordPress has proved remarkably robust, I just spun up a theme I built around 2005/2006. See the code here (please forgive some of the code, this was 11 years ago. ) and it still works! The Loop is still the same crazy Loop, that I am never sure I fully got, anyway the point being if I had installed a theme from 2005 it would still work today.
So pretty amazing and points to why WordPress was a good solution 10 years ago and is still a good solution now, we don’t talk about longevity much in web development, but I like to know something I build now has a shot of existing 2, 5, 10, or even 20 years from now.
Sure we now have custom post types, custom taxonomies, rest API and some amazing plugins that turn WordPress into a fully fledged CMS, but at it’s core it’s the same easy to use, easy to develop on and easy to recommend system I first installed all those years ago.
Now my own workflow has changed a bit, whereas back in the day all I needed was a copy of WordPress, Dreamweaver! (Code View & FTP) and maybe Photoshop.
These days it’s a bit more involved, this is what I tend to start most new projects with, on average I reckon the setup is about half a day, give or take:
Code
- WordPress
- Sage starter theme
- Foundation by Zurb
- jQuery via Bower
- Modernizr via Bower
- Gulp/Grunt (mostly Gulp these days) – Example setup file
- Sass
- Github/Bitbucket
- Stackoverflow
WordPress plugins
Applications
- Atom
- Photoshop / Illustrator (for SVGs)
- iTerm/Terminal
Anyway, thanks WordPress
