Developing WordPress Themes with Git

WordPress in itself is not overly hard to understand. You don’t need to be a developer in order to craft your own WordPress themes. There is plenty of information out there to help you with pretty much any question that might turn up.

Enter Version Control

Once you get to the point where you feel that version control might be a useful tool things get different. Most people will point you to Git, probably the most widely used version control software around. A lot of people, though, seem to have trouble getting started with it.

What we found is that Git stands for a very different concept from WordPress. While with WordPress usability has always been part of the deal, Git was designed to be powerful, fast and lean. It definitely wasn’t made to be easily understood by people who don’t know how to use command line or don’t embrace abstract models.

Motivation

Implementing Git as our choice of version control was one of the most challenging tasks for us as a team. Making the developer understand what the designer (and developer of custom WordPress themes) really needs was pretty tough. Explaining the functionality of Git to the designer was comparably difficult.

What we want to share with you

Instead of throwing basic commands at you we want to invite you to explore the “Git Universe” with us in a kind of fireside chat between Kirsten, representing the web design world and Elisabeth, who gained her first computer experience with Basic many years ago.
Our focus will be on how Git works, what those strange commands really mean and how you can benefit from integrating it into your theme development work flow.

This talk aims at people working with WordPress and developing their own themes.