One suggestion I have would be to offer installation for Roots. The Grunt/Composer stuff will go over a lot of people’s heads. I’m familiar with installing packages on Apache but it’s only something I do once in a blue moon so even after doing these things for years I’m not very comfortable with it and question whether I’ve done something right.
$25 - $75 for installing WordPress/Roots/Grunt/Composer would be cool. I probably would have already paid for it instead of trying to figure it out myself.
It’s obviously helpful to get some guidance on a tool when starting out on it, but if someone just paid to get it done they wouldn’t really understand it if something went wrong. We ideally want people to learn some of these development tools and then pick their own. We’re going to be giving recommendations basically.
I doubt we’d ever offer a direct service for something like this, but people can always reach out to us for freelance/consulting jobs if they want.
Thank you for the response. I definitely see your logic behind this and understand where you’re coming from. Still, I think it’s asking too much of a lot of people and think a service would be greatly beneficial to a lot of people and give a way for the Roots guys to monetize.
As it stands, there’s little to no documentation for new people with no experience
This is hieroglyphs to most, I think. New people won’t have the slightest clue as to what they need to do. People on shared hosting will be pulling their hair out for hours before even realizing they can’t install packages on a shared hosting environment. Even if someone has a dedicated server set up, a lot don’t even know what SSH is, how to use an SSH client, what the basic commands are, working with linux, blah blah blah.
IMO it’s asking too much to tell new people to just learn it. Maybe an aspiring designer or whatever but for someone who sees the advantages of using Roots, has 1 website (eg. their business website) – expecting them to learn all of this stuff because one day it may not work is off-track. Just my 2 cents! Thanks for listening.
I’ll be making a screencast for Grunt + Roots, but you shouldn’t be installing those node packages on your production server because it’s not necessary if you’re developing locally (and you should be!)
Like Scott said, a direct service for this with set prices probably isn’t going to happen. There’d have to be a lot of disclaimers in place, everything would have to be quoted, etc. (and $25-75 would be extremely low + not possible)
That was one thing that I was confused about: Is grunt meant to be installed on my computer or my server? With all of the linux-looking commands, I assumed my server.
What do you guys develop locally with?
Does that mean that it’s bad my main.min.css has a version string appended to it on my site?
Lastly, I’ve used services like http://www.configserver.com/cp/index.html – or misc. server admin services if I’ve needed security, optimization, etc and they’re a HUGE help. So that’s where my thought process was coming from.
You should be developing on your local machine and not directly on a server, and then somehow deploying your changes to your servers. The version string being appended is not bad, that’s intended.
Hopefully we’ll be able to clear up all the confusion soon - feedback like yours is much appreciated!
I almost created a new thread just to mention something slightly off-topic, then I realized it’ll better be here so some of us can make more sense of what I have to say.
I agree with @swalkinshaw on the fixed price (though from this side of the world, that looks a reasonable price to charge) which I think, it’ll be best to learn esp the first time and if found the process is repeatable and still not able to, then perhaps a consultation or service would help.
I use PagodaBox for some of my sites so like it or not, I have to develop locally in order to host it there. That helps a lot in terms of forcing me to learn it to practice that, and it’s really frustrating for the first few times and I noticed I keep on forgetting how.
I learn that writing it down (on my blog) helps not only myself much later as reference, but probably others who might have the same issue as I did.
I’m still clueless about this whole grunt thing and how I could implement in in my development workflow. Look forward to @ben 's screencast.