Roots Radio – Topics/Questions

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 :wink:

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

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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!)

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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 :slight_smile:

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Good suggestion. We have @JulienMelissas looking into the best settings going forward.

@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 :smile:

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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.

Just got done listening to the Updates Ep 11.

Loved the mentions of React. I’m admittedly a newb at JavaScript. Understanding gulpfiles or implementing plugins is about as deep as I’ve gone.

Where is the best place to learn React? I hate to admit it, but reading the docs front to back isn’t usually as appealing to me as digging into a video tutorial and getting my hands dirty. I have a tuts+ membership, I’ll look into that.

Edit: I’m checking out these courses:

That topic really stuck a chord with me because I’m really interested in building analytical admin dashboards and reports.

Thanks for the enlightening topics!

I’d love to hear more about your theory’s/approaches to issues, as opposed to explicit detail on a subject. For example: the recent let’s encrypt feature is amazing, I’d love to know how you guys tackled the problem and came to a solution. When merging from the Trellis upstream into mine, I love to look through the commit history and see if I can figure out your thinking and thought process via the changes so any more insight into those kind of processes would be really valuable (to me anyway)

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