A month ago the development of Twenty Twenty, the new default theme for WordPress 5.3, started. I was fortunate enough to see the development starting in the early days. As I’m very passionate about theme development, I contributed pretty much from the first day.
I remember that in our first weekly call we agreed on not using any build tools to keep the entrance level very low. While I loved that decision, it turned out that some build tools are quite helpful. A few examples are the automatic creation of an RTL stylesheet or the auto-prefixing of style definitions. While these tasks can be done manually, it takes ages for something a build tool achieves in seconds.
The more the project progressed, the more “helpers” we introduces. Thanks to that, I was able to learn the purpose of .editorconfig,.eslintrc, .stylelintrc.json, .travis.yml, composer.json, package.json, phpcs.xml.dist and postcss.config.js. I also learned the importance PHP_CodeSniffer and WordPress Coding Standards for PHP_CodeSniffer during development.
By contributing to Open Source, I could learn much more in just one month that I could learn in the previous 12 months by following YouTube tutorials. I’m very thankful for that and this would be possible without the help of the following people: