Our Common Web Site Tools and Libraries
Most of our web sites get anywhere from a little to a lot of custom plugin or script work, but recently, they’ve been sharing more and more tech.
When we build a site right now, there’s a solid chance it’ll include:
- Wordpress. Thanks to tons of intelligent, progressive developments over the past couple years, it’s transformed from blogging software toin a very nice platform for a small business Content Management System.
- Carrington, a developer-friendly theme for Wordpress. Functionally, it doesn’t really “do” a lot– but that’s the point. It organizes your development efforts so that you can customize a site, without losing track of what logic goes where. Early web dev tends towards the frontier hackery until there’s enough experience with the tools to start cleaning things up (see: Dojo et. al. for Javascript). Carrington is the next step in taming the Wordpress as CMS frontier.
- WP-Super-Cache. You always need it, but you REALLY need it with Carrington.
- Prototype or jQuery. This really depends on if I’m pulling in any external libraries that use one or the other– if so, my decision’s made up for me. In the absence of any requirement, I’ve tended towards Prototype (and Scriptaculous) in the past, but jQuery’s syntax is addictive. It’s a toss-up now.
- Minify. This is pretty specific to your hosting setup, but for now we use Minify to keep Javascript and CSS size from dominating page load times.
- Custom tools. We’ve got a few tools that have become standard, but aren’t quite ready for posting to the public. We use a post-inserter plugin on some sites to enhance editability without going all the way to something like Drupal. We’ve got some automated backup tools, both for site files as well as content, that we use (supplemented by WP-DB-Backup). And so on.
I’ll post updates as other tools work their way into the stack. Customizable Post Listings has become somewhat common. Text Control used to be standard, but isn’t as essential since Wordpress editing got cleaned up.