SanePress

WordPress development made (almost) reasonable

You are going to make a WordPress site, deal with it. As a web developer, it will come that sad moment in your professional life when you are forced to build a WordPress site by some obtuse client or a sadistic project manager.

The news is that YOU ARE NOT ALONE. Just clone the SanePress repository in your site folder and enter a world of sane(r) WordPress development.

What is SanePress?

Basically, it is just a standard WordPress installation complete with some essential plugins pre-installed, pre-configured, pre-activated, pre-anything. For your convenience.

Which plugins are bundled with SanePress?

Timber

This is the most important one. Never build a WordPress site without Timber, never ever. Why?

MVC
Twig template engine
Object Oriented Posts, Terms, Users, etc.
Routing
Caching
And so much more…

What does it mean? A lot of things, but let me give you a quick and enlightening example (straight from Timber docs):

Say you’ve created a page called “About Us” and WordPress has given it the slug about-us. (…) You can simply create a file called page-about-us.twig inside your views folder and go crazy.

Then you can think of your theme’s pages.php file as a controller for your page templates. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. For more info: https://github.com/jarednova/timber/wiki

Advanced Custom Fields

Define as many groups of custom fields as you like and assign them to pages, posts, custom post types, etc. through a handy settings page. Plus: it is perfectly integrated with Timber.

WP-SCSS

A SCSS compiler. You put your .scss files into the scss/ folder of your theme, you get your .css files into the css/ folder. Dead simple.

Rocket Galleries

This is the gallery management feature missing in WordPress. For some reason somebody decided you can’t just create a gallery whenever you like. Now you can.

Custom Post Types

There are a few different ways to define custom post types, and each comes with its own pros and cons. SanePress encourages to do it inside a site-specific (thus not linked to any theme), “Must Use” plugin (i.e. one that is loaded automatically and it’s not listed in the Plugins section of WordPress’ control panel). You find a stub of a custom post type definition in:

wp-content/mu-plugins/custom-post-types.php

Just edit the plugin and create as many types as you like.

Which themes are bundled with SanePress?

Just the sanepress theme, which is essentially a slightly modified version of the timber-starter-theme, to include WP-SCSS folders plus some handy comments (i.e. useful shortcuts to CDN versions of Bootstrap and Foundation frameworks, etc.). The starter theme provides an über-clean foundation and structure to build your site on.

How does it work?

All the auto-activating, auto-configuring stuff is carried out after the installation process by a custom Must Use plugin:

wp-content/mu-plugins/_sanepress.php

Does it break any standard WordPress feature?

Hopefully not.

How do I install SanePress?

Just clone this repository in the (new or empty) folder you want to install Word… ehm SanePress to:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alessiomaffeis/SanePress.git <path>

and make these two directories writable, in order for WP-SCSS to be able to generate CSS files:

mkdir -p  wp-content/plugins/wp-scss/cache/
chmod 777 wp-content/plugins/wp-scss/cache/
chmod 777 wp-content/themes/sanepress/css/

(just promise me you’ll never chmod 777 in production).

Then go through the standard WordPress installation steps. That’s it.