The following are the tools we use at 10up. This list will grow and change over time and is not meant to be comprehensive. Generally, we encourage or require these tools to be used in favor of other ones. Rules governing tools to be used and packaged with a client site will be much stricter than those used on internal projects.
At 10up, we use Vagrant and/or Docker to build and interact with virtual environments that match production as closely as possible. There are many setups and configurations available. The following setups are the only ones we support internally.
Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV) - Our standard Vagrant setup for client sites and local development. This was originally a 10up project (now open-sourced) and something with which we have a lot of familiarity.
WP Docker - A simple Docker-based development environment. This setup is great because it’s very easy to setup, simple to interact with, and makes standardizing package versions (i.e. PHP) extremely easy.
Grunt - Grunt is a task runner built on Node that lets you automate tasks like Sass preprocessing and JS minification. Grunt is our default task runner and has a great community of plugins and solutions we use for on company and client projects.
Gulp - Gulp is also a task runner build on Node that offers a similar suite of plugins and solutions to Grunt. The biggest difference is Gulp allows you direct access to the stream of information from your source files and allows you to modify this data directly.
Webpack - Webpack is a bundler for JS/CSS. It’s extremely useful when building larger JavaScript applications (i.e. React.js).
Bower - A good tool to manage front end packages. Usually everything we need is bundled with WordPress. Sometimes we need something like “Chosen.js” that isn’t included. Bower is a good way to manage external libraries like that but is not necessary on most projects.
Composer - We use Composer for managing PHP dependencies. Usually everything we need is bundled with WordPress. Sometimes we need external libraries like “Patchwork”. Composer is a great way to manage those external libraries but is not necessary on most projects.
Git - At 10up we use Git for version control. We encourage people to use the command line for interacting with Git. GUIs are permitted but will not be supported internally.
SVN - We use SVN, but only in the context of WordPress.com VIP. Again, we encourage people to use the command line as we do not support GUIs internally.
WP-CLI - A command line interface for WordPress. This is an extremely powerful tool that allows us to do imports, exports, run custom scripts, and more via the command line. Often this is the only way we can affect a large database (WordPress.com VIP or WP Engine). This tool is installed by default on VVV and VIP Quickstart.
We use a variety of tools to test our sites for accessibility issues. WebAim has some great resources on how to evaluate sites with a screen reader.
We’re also a fan of a few browser tools that lend us a hand when it comes to testing areas like color contrast, heading hierarchy, and ARIA application.