building.md

Building SiteOrigin plugins

There are few steps necessary to prepare a plugin for release on the WordPress.org plugin directory. We use Gulp to automate this.

Environment setup

1. Download and install Node.js and npm.
2. In a terminal, navigate to the root of the plugin directory and run npm install
3. Get some coffee while npm installs the required packages.

Running builds

There are two build tasks, build:release and build:dev.

The release task performs the following subtasks:

1. Updates the version number in the {plugin-name}.php and readme.txt files.
2. Compiles LESS files to CSS.
3. Minifies JavaScript files and adds a .min suffix.
4. Copies all files to a dist/{plugin-name} folder.
5. Creates a .zip archive with the appropriate filename ready for uploading to wordpress.org.

Release task usage:

gulp build:release -v version

Where version should be replaced with the required version number. For example, say the next version of the plugin is 1.2.3:

gulp build:release -v 1.2.3

The dev build task only has one subtask:

1. Watch LESS files for changes and compile to CSS.

This is simply to avoid having to manually recompile LESS files while working on them.