Orange County WordPress Meetup: Gulp

orange county wordpress meetup on gulp

Gulp is a javascript toolkit for repetitive task automation in the development process. It is an evolution from earlier task runner tools like Grunt. Gulp has a bit of an advantage over earlier tools in that it allows you to script the tasks that need to be managed ad hoc.

What Can You Manage?

One of the key advantages to using Gulp is the scripting of the compiling processes that you want to use in your workflow. You can set up a hit list of the different functions that you want to run on your files as you work with them. You can set exclusions for files that shouldn’t be modified as well.

There is a broad variety of functions that you can put into play. You can have your sass automatically compile to CSS on the fly, set up script minification, concatenation, or uglifying. You can set up and run unit tests, and set up translation checks. 

The list of plugins for Gulp just continues to grow. The tool is open source and you can support their efforts with donations or donate time to provide work to the project.

Why Would You Use Gulp?

The biggest advantage of a Gulp workflow is automation. It’s very easy to set up the list of functions that you want to perform on a site. But, it’s very easy to forget that you want to apply them each time you’re making a commit. It’s also easy to perform functions in an order that may not be optimized. 

By setting up your workflow once and watching the set of files you designate you’ll not only complete the function you want, but it will run the functions every time you change a file that needs that function applied.

Task managers are a great addition to your workflow and easy to modify over time so as your workflow changes, your Gulp scripts can adapt with the new requirements. If you have any questions about Gulp or setting up your workflow, be sure to reach out to us.

Written by the Team at Pixel Jar

We hope you got something useful out of that post. If you'd like to read more we have an active blog with topics across the spectrum of website development. If you're researching information for a project we'd love to talk to you about it.

How AI is Revolutionizing WordPress

How AI is Revolutionizing WordPress

Artificial intelligence has definitely become a game-changer across many industries, from healthcare and finance to retail and manufacturing. Unsurprisingly, web development has also been impacted by the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning. This impact expanded beyond the use of coding assistants to include other aspects as well. In this article, we will explore…
Read More
Hawk Talk Podcast

Brandon Hosts the Hawk Talk Podcast

Brandon was the second host of the new podcast from John Hawkins, Hawk Talk Podcast. Check it out.
Read More

Learn how to understand your website's strengths and weaknesses, and how to make changes for the best possible chance at success.

Download Now

How Can We Help You?

We want to build your next project.

Connect with Pixel Jar

Our Community

Subscribe to learn more about the goings on at Pixel Jar.

  • Note: Your email will be added to our CRM and be used to receive emails from Pixel Jar. You can unsubscribe at any time.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.