VS Code is a new editor from Microsoft (I guess some may insert an obligatory flaming remark here, but I think they’ve done some pretty good stuff as of late) that I’ve only been following off and on since it was first announced.
- Visual Studio Wordpress Tutorial
- Visual Studio Wordpress Download
- Visual Studio Code Wordpress Coding Standards
- Wordpress Snippet
On February 23rd Eric and Alex gave a presentation at their local WordPress user group, MSPWP, on using Docker to mount local copies of WordPress sites for development. They demonstrated editing a site from Visual Studio Code.Finally, they covered getting started with debugging using XDebug in VS Code. Only a week and a half before they gave their presentation they first began experimenting. My Website: Get Bunifu Framework 20% Off Use coupon kimtoo: https.
Before working for myself, I was focused on .NET development and to this day, I’ve yet to find an IDE that I like as much as that.
But then, late last week, I saw this tweet:
Maybe I should move on to vs code? This is cool: https://t.co/UKBiolRC7d
— Per Søderlind ?? (@soderlind) October 14, 2016
Followed by this:
i have — i’ve kept my eye on it, but i’ve not had time to look into it.
i’m unsure if it’d allow us to wire up codesniffers..?
— Tom McFarlin (@tommcfarlin) October 14, 2016
And then this resulted in a good, albeit short conversation.
I’ve never been a fan of switching IDEs in the middle of client projects (for some reasons), so I didn’t plan on giving this particular IDE a try for the foreseeable future.
But given that I’ve got a set of unfinished projects lying around and given that I had some time to myself this weekend, I opted to see how well VS Code worked with a couple of WordPress-based projects.
VS Code For WordPress Development
First, this is not going to be a comprehensive post. It’s going to be far from it. Instead, I’m simply going to focus on what little I was able to get setup and my initial impressions.
Visual Studio Wordpress Tutorial
Specifically, I set up the following:
- Opened a WordPress-specific project,
- Setup PHPCS using Composer along with the WordPress Coding Standard ruleset,
- Used the integrated Terminal,
- Briefly experimented with the integrated debugger.
To be clear, some of these tests required packages, so I’ll make sure to list those off in this post and dive into each of the above points in a future post.
I will say that my initial impressions are positive. It didn’t take long to get my bearings, to get started customizing my setup (with my preferred font, font size, whitespace rules, and the PHP Coding Standards).
I’d have to say that the highlight of testing the editor gave me the first experience, out-of-the-box, that few editors have. This feels like a much more minimal copy of Visual Studio for .NET (as it should).
It’s fast (though I know this is subjective), it has good package management, and it’s easy to get started with all of the various tools one would expect for intermediate-to-advanced WordPress development.
If you get a chance, I recommend reading The Basics of Visual Studio Code.
The inevitable question will be if this can hold its own against an IDE such as PhpStorm. Right now, I can’t answer that, but I should be able to do in a future post.
For those who are curious, the main things I’m interested in evaluating are:
- Debugging,
- Git-integration (yes, I love Tower but if I can consolidate and do so elegantly, then I will),
- Subversion integration (for those projects that in the WordPress plugin repository),
- Symbol Replacement and refactoring,
- And perhaps a few more than I’ve yet to think of while mentioning here.
Visual Studio Wordpress Download
All of this will come in future posts, though.
Visual Studio Code Wordpress Coding Standards
Installed Packages
Here’s a list of all of the packages I’ve installed thus far. If you have any to add (or you’d recommend removing), then let me know in the comments.
Wordpress Snippet
I’ll be sure to keep this list updated in future posts, as well. I’m working to keep all of my VS Code related posts tagged as such so it will be easy to find them.