Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.

I'm not a Ruby developer, so I can't comment if this makes it easier for someone who lives in both Rails and Wordpress, but as someone who has to occasionally make a custom Wordpress theme and has no experience in Rails, this looks like a <i>lot</i> of complexity just to put together a theme. However, I could see this being very nice for someone whose time consists mostly of Wordpress themes, and you obviously put a lot of work into it, so I don't want to write it off. It's cool you were able to make such a feature-rich Wordpress plugin.<p>Just to make sure: the production/live machine doesn't need the Wordless plugin, correct? Basically you use the Wordless plugin on the dev machine then just distribute the created theme directory like normal? Or am I off-base?

This seems like an awful lot of extra layering on top of WP's horribly ugly theming system... And adding Ruby as a requirement? What about building on PHP-based tools like Assetic, or a cleaner template format?<p><a href="https://github.com/kriswallsmith/assetic" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kriswallsmith/assetic</a><p>I've never understood why people were willing to jump through so many hoops building themes in WP's messy way.<p>As a comparison, here's a complete theme (based on the Twitter Bootstrap toolkit) for my current PHP-based project (self-promo, but illustrates the difference well IMO):<p><a href="https://github.com/jbroadway/bootstrapped" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jbroadway/bootstrapped</a><p>One HTML file, Bootstrap + one short CSS file, zero mixing of PHP code. Most WP alternatives offer similar theming, either Mustache-based like the above is based on, or Twig, both of which are much much cleaner options IMO.

&#62;&#62;Ability to write PHP code using the beautiful Haml templating system; &#62;&#62;Ability to write CSS stylesheets using the awesome Sass syntax [...]; &#62;&#62;Ability to write Javascript logic in Coffeescript;<p>Some may like that, but I want to write my PHP in PHP, and write my CSS in CSS, and write my JS in JS. I really never got why I would write one language in another language just to then use some tool to translate it (and if it gets a little complicated have to manually fix translation problems afterwards). Can someone explain please?

If you're going to use all the new hip tools (and take the time to learn how to use them), just go one step farther and stop using Wordpress.

I feel this is solving a problem that doesn't exist.<p>The problem with creating a WordPress theme isn't that it's missing buzzwordy tech like HAML, SASS and CoffeeScript. The problem is that the PHP behind WordPress is hideous. Even in version 3.x<p>If someone were to fork WordPress and fix all the spaghetti code, then I could stop writing themes like it was 1998...

This is awesome! I've often lamented how messy Wordpress is compared to Rails. Yet, there's nothing as mature and easy for anyone to use as Wordpress in Rails.

I would love to hear some comments from you. I think this really speeds up custom Wordpress theme creation.

Looks like a whole bunch of stuff I'm not sure anyone (WP theme devs) was asking for. Cool project though, I'm just not sure the added layers really benefit developers much who are already used to the current system.

I've got a feeling most people writing Wordpress themes wont meet the requirement of having Ruby installed.

Shouldn't that be "stop writing WordPress themes like it's 2003"?

Jesus Christ. Can we stop all this "PHP Sucks" nonsense? We get it, a language like ruby is better for <i>you</i>. And hell, there's not much of an argument against how PHP looks; Ruby and Python, to me, look much much nicer.<p>But complaints about its technological capability are completely false. It's super easy and simple to learn, and even a HTMl/CSS guy like me is able to build pretty powerful, dynamic websites and simple apps with WordPress and (gasp!) PHP.<p>Before you start shitting on PHP, realize that a) you're arguing over a programming language lol b) it's been around for a long time and thus has a huge community, good documentation, lots of books and resources, and comes preinstalled on a lot of servers, etc, c) great applications like MailChimp, Wikipedia, Digg, and FaceBook use PHP extensively d) the learning curve is low e) yeah, it is ugly. But its easiness to learn got me into quasi-programming with WordPress, and since seeing .rb files I've begun to get curious about ruby. But the basic programming knowledge is there from PHP experience and facilitates learning other languages.<p>Sorry, it's just frustrating to see people making fun of a language and criticizing the people who work with it.

Cool. As someone doing heavy WordPress development (and will be doing even heavier dev. in the future) this is a step in the right direction.<p>The available tools for WordPress right now are just awful. I'm doing plugin development right now (but will get to themes in a couple of months); and in order to setup unit testing it took me a full 3 days.<p>When coding plug-ins, I noticed that I'm using awful and very old patterns (like mixing PHP with HTML). It's like I'm working on PHP when I was 15 years old. Checking a few WordPress plug-ins (popular and premium ones), it even proved to be worse: They were using procedural code and patterns. Huge and long code, a bunch of functions with long names binding to WordPress actions or filters.<p>Here are the improvements that I'm looking for (and working on):<p>1. Better Unit Testing: A better stack for Unit Testing.<p>2. Better debugging: Debugging is just a nightmare when doing WordPress development and your project (I'm using Netbeans) should point to your plug-in repository.<p>3. Developers plug-in: A plug-in to manage your WordPress install<p>4. Bootstrap plug-in: Administration interfaces (styles/tables/forms/buttons...)<p>EDIT: I just noticed that the following<p><pre><code> Include the assets in your Haml views using include_javascript() helper. = include_javascript("application") This will produce the following HTML, pointing to the assets/javascripts directory: &#60;script src="/wp-content/themes/YOUR_THEME/assets/javascripts/application.js" type="text/javascript"&#62;&#60;/script&#62; </code></pre> This is a very bad practice. You should use WordPress functions to queue scripts and styles.

&#62; Ability to write Coffeescript instead of the boring, oldish Javascript;<p>stopped reading right there.

LOL.<p>Why not just go the whole hog and run wordpress <i>inside</i> ruby, using tenderlove's Phuby bridge/adapter/thing.<p><a href="https://github.com/tenderlove/phuby" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tenderlove/phuby</a><p>Demo of him actually using this to run wordpress inside rack: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXERy8Y2eVo" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXERy8Y2eVo</a><p>Or, you know, spend a day knocking together your own blog in rails.<p>I guess it could be good if you are wedded to a preexisting client base which demands wordpress, even for new projects, in which case my sincerest condolences go out to you.<p>To be fair, I'd imagine that those people who are raking in big $$$ doing WP themes must have something like this set up already.

This is... impressive.<p>Not for me, though. When I got my current webcomic up and running I didn't even bother writing a custom theme like I did before - I just made a child theme of the Comicpress theme and started hacking away at the CSS.<p>It is inefficient, it is inelegant... but I got it up and running in a couple of days rather than a couple of weeks of tweaking the hell out of everything. Every now and then when the comic's being hard to write I procrastinate by tweaking the theme a little more.<p>I don't know if this means I'm a talentless hack or a pragmatic professional. Maybe some of both.<p>Then again I'm also not doing a crazy dynamic site that happens to be using Wordpress as its backend.

Although I've built WP themes and have "dabbled" in Rails (building a blog like everyone else) and consider myself more of a front-end guy, this seems like overkill to me.<p>Not to mention most designers I know would look at this and roll their eyes.

I appreciate the work that must have gone into this, and it looks like it has been done well technically. However: How many people are this deep in the world of Ruby and yet also enjoy writing WordPress themes? I run a forum devoted to WordPress, and I can not imagine any of the experts (who post there) wanting to switch over to Haml or Coffeescript. Most people who use WordPress are either designers or programmers who are looking to put up a somewhat quick-n-dirty CMS.<p>If you have the skills and resources to install a Ruby environment and a bunch of gems, why not use Rails plus some CMS built with Rails?

Interesting concept, but like others have said, I'm not sure if you're catering to the right crowd. I've taken a handful of computer science classes and am a web designer at heart, yet even I would not be very inclined to use this. I would rather do it from scratch if I'm interested in learning these newer languages like CoffeeScript. Wordpress is more for those who don't know anything and/or want to build a semi-customizable blog/website quickly.<p>That being said, this is a fantastic project and I applaud you for doing this. I hope those who do use it end up enjoying it.

I was wordpress hater for two reasons - messy templates and messy plugins. This hate came from my "consulting" days when I often had to fix and add more features to existing wordpress websites.<p>Nice to see someone investing time into building rigid structure for templates... (Although it looks like a bit too much for me :)) But probably it worth learning Ruby, Haml, Sasl, coffee-script, etc)<p>Now if someone could come up with something very defined for plugins and make somehow all "wordpress programmers" use it for both templates and plugins - word could be better :)

What I really want is to be able to download a word press theme and have it magically applied to my rails app or have some plugin that let's me do this.

I was expecting something more lightweight. The dependency on Ruby and HAML is a buzz killer.

Another project similar to this is Forge <a href="http://forge.thethemefoundry.com/" rel="nofollow">http://forge.thethemefoundry.com/</a> Embracing Sass, Less, CoffeeScript is not a bad idea for wordpress themes if you are familiar with them.

For those of you who want to use modern PHP with WordPress, there's Wordpress MTV: <a href="https://github.com/newsapps/wordpress-mtv" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/newsapps/wordpress-mtv</a>

"1. Your development machine needs a ruby environment"<p>C'mon. All this work and no PHP/Wordpress developer that will ever use this. What a shame.

This could be great for WPMU devs/admins that want to be able to have a lot of unique themes to offer their users.

All credibility was lost when I read Wordpress.<p>#capitalPdangit

awesome!!!

This looks really like what I needed, it looks awesome!

This nearly made me sick. Yes, let's use RUBY to generate our PHP. That makes loads of sense.<p>Then you said HAML, and I giggled.<p>Then you said SASS, and I started cackling.<p>Then you said CoffeeScript, and I nearly died of laughter.<p>Keep your Rubyist junk out of my (unbeloved) PHP.