Along with what Julien said, Migrate DB Proisopen source. Paying for code and open source are not mutually exclusive.
1 Like
Ah, I didn’t realise that. I’ve deleted my original post after reading those links. Thanks for informing me 
No worries at all… I just thought I’d point it out 
- it’s up to each person if they want to use it or not.
Love your product! Especially excited that y’all launched a podcast.
Question - How does the Roots team choose one development tool vs another with the growing landscape?
For example, I noticed the newer releases of Sage use Gulp instead of Grunt. What’s the tipping point in your workflow? I’m always a bit hesitant to make a switch like that because inevitably you have to prune through all your old tasks / dependencies, especially if I have old clients using the “legacy” workflow.
1 Like
Hi roots team. I am brand new to roots, and I’m super stoked about it. Just listened to the first 4 episodes of the podcast. I especially like the freelancing episode. I have been dabbling in WordPress off and on for years, but am really thinking about trying to dive in as a freelancer to quit the 9-5 eventually. I’d love to hear more conversations around freelancing with WordPress. Specifically, for a new entrant, how can I land small business clients and sell them on a custom WordPress stack over something like Squarespace? I really care about performance through the whole stack (thus learning the roots tools this weekend), but how can I turn that into a real selling point to land clients? Any other new-to-freelancing tips would be great as well.
2 Likes
Hi guys,
Like the podcasts! Here’s some topics for you:
Possible solutions in the future: roadmap of projects, deployment alternatives, stuff like HAL
What do you imagine dev will be like in 5, or 10 years?
Do you see WP surviving that long without making big changes?
No design or UX has been really touched on yet. What do you think about the growing sameness in web design, a.k.a. results driven design - is creativity dying?
The times where freelancing, WordPress, clients and roots all conjugate. For instance, have handed projects off before and had people freak out about the bedrock folder structure, how would you handle that? Also E.G. Hosting, billing, site maintenance, database management/syncing among a team, non-transactional email, etc.
Looking forward to the next show
3 Likes
I need to better understand of version control strategies. For example, let’s say I have some plugins that are available on wpackagist or github and some premium (like gravity forms, for example). I guess I would put those in my composer.json file and take gravity forms out of my .gitignore file (?). I guess that would be good for tracking files, but what’s the best way/time to backup/migrate all the database settings (WP DB migrate pro)? How does this fit into all my environments and deployment? It would be great to get an end to end example of this along with trashing the local project folder completely and restoring everything from github/db backups.
3 Likes
Deployment strategies and requirements
Hi if you guys could gear some episodes to someone newer to wordpress and web development, that would really help me out.
Topic Idea #1: When should you use Roots, and what type of person is it for?
Shed light on other things big in the WordPress ecosystem like _s and Genesis. I posted a thread about this.
Topic Idea #2: I also really enjoyed the freelancing episode and would like more on that.
Topic Idea #3: Multiple sites (separate WordPress installations) with Trellis. I want to set up my portfolio site with Roots where I can have various bedrock installations on one trellis site, to have temporary staging sites for clients… As described by @poggen here https://discourse.roots.io/t/best-practice-for-trellis-with-multiple-sites/3981?u=poggen
I think this pattern would be ideal for any freelancers using “the Roots WordPress Stack,” and better compared to having different staging servers. Talking about how to accomplish this, possible roadblocks and problems, and best practices would be cool.
Hey guys - seeing as you were mentioning my forum posts in your podcasts (me dreaming about an old cowboy Austin) thought I would chip in here. Feel free to ignore these suggestions - your podcast is awesome
WordPress alternatives and why not?
-
I used to work in .Net, does loads of nice stuff but obviously OPEN SOURCE ALL THE WAY.
-
I’ve used Drupal twice. Nice module directory but horrible UI for client’s. No AJAX, no auto-save, no trash bin for posts, urgh.
-
joomla just seems to not be used
-
WordPress is largest market share. Easy to go with majority choice as it means I’m not locked in to the client and neither is the client to me
-
Austin is a Rails guy (and seems like more of Roots team). Rails looks amazing and I love to hear what DHH has to say but it seems there’s no Rails CMS like Wordpress?
Is it a case of if there were a good Rails or Node CMS you’d all go to that and be making Roots stuff for that?
Basically there’s a lot of Wordpress bashing in the podcasts without a real explanation of why we go with Wordpress. There’s talk of “the ecosystem” but I only ever use 5 Wordpress plugins.
WordPress as e-commerce (Presumably on the Woo-commerce plugin).
This is a cry for help as occasionally I’m building Magento sites (skinning
them up). I’ve not much e-commerce experience but I really hate
Magneto, Configuration over convention. Endless xml. Template
inheritance Hell. With WordPress plugin directory style really bad Extensions.
Basically people seem to say Magento is better than Woo-commerce for “scale” (whatever that means - no proof supplied)
Personally I’d love to just do all my e-commerce sites in Woo-commerce using Roots. Help!
so I can in future say “but the Roots guys say”
Cheers guys and keep up the good work!
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/net-core-is-open-source.aspx 
Haha, there is some bashing. But it comes from experience, a lot of experience. It is the ecosystem, the fact that even if we only have a few core plugins we use on every site there are still options for both us and the client
The software itself is also a big selling point. Especially with Roots tools, it’s quick to get a quality website up and running that is still easy to train a client on. Not to mention there are always WP jobs.
Wait… This was supposed to be answered on the podcast… Sorry! Well I’m sure we can continue the discussion
1 Like
Oh wow that .Net blog post is an interesting read. It’s been a few years since I was on .Net but I remember reading lots from Miguel de Icaza. I hadn’t realised there was a .Net foundation - but I just have a gut feeling to never trust MS on this kind of stuff as they’ll probably stab us all in the back if they get market share!!
I was out hiking with a .Net dev the other weekend and laughed in this face when I told him it was open source but wow looks like he’s right!
I suppose then the question should be “Why not use a .Net open source CMS like Umbraco?”
oh no. I would say a Freudian slip but tbh I’ve always found myself more on Magneto’s side (please don’t continue this discussion!)
1 Like
I have a general suggestion / request regarding the podcasts - I noticed some of the files are about 120-150mb in size, and I was wondering if it was possible for you to change the MP3 settings when you save them so we can get them down to about 50mb or so? Just so it’s a bit less of a bandwidth hit to those who listen on mobile data plans
1 Like
@drawcardau - I was able to get podcasts down to ~35mb and still sounding pretty good thanks to some transcoding magic. Moving forward we will try to use that and possibly update the previous ones if we can get the time.
Thanks for bringing this up, the audio work I do for fun is alway super high quality (recoded at 192kbps, and I often listen to FLAC), so I just didn’t know best practice for podcasts 
5 Likes
Hi Roots Team, loved your breakdown of Calypso on Ep:10. Now that I’ve got a basic handle on ReactJS, studying Automattic’s repo has been a huge help.
QUESTION: Do you have any idea why Automattic is using ES5 for all of their components? They already load several Babel packages in with their dependencies. Wouldn’t it make more sense to build a more future-proof solution?
Ref Link – React on ES6+
Last but not least, thanks for all your work! You guys have improved my WordPress coding 10-fold ever since I stumbled across Roots.
I’m trying to get through every episode, probably only halfway in currently. So I’ll add more questions/comments as I think of them.
In the Sage episode 05, I like when Nick Fox brought up his paper cut out method. I’m a big fan of trying to reverse engineer the bulk of the project in your mind before putting it to code.
For example, Walter O’Brien (a.k.a Scorpion, who did a recent podcast with Tim Ferriss) says that in hackathon competitions you are judged on the quality of your code. The way the winners are trained is to sit there and not touch their keyboards until their time is almost up. By then, they’ve reworked the cleanest way to write out the solution.
So my question is regarding the details of the paper cut out method. What types of things does he write on the back of the paper? Notes? Code? Could we get some specific examples?
Does he stack templates on top of another paper that represents the base.php, and put notes on the base.php as well?
Just curious about practical scenarios. I’d love to try this method out myself because I usually do something similar, but without using a “box cutter” (exacto knife?)
Thanks! I’ll try to come up with some more questions.