From great resource repos and frameworks to free courses and how to prepare for your job interview: In this post, we'll provide you with plenty of material to improve your workflow as a developer - both in general and with WordPress - and take your career one step further. 

WordPress development

1st Gutenberg Block Creator Toolkit

The subtitle of this repo is "A zero-configuration developer toolkit for building WordPress Gutenberg block plugins" - and that's exactly what it does. It allows you to develop Gutenberg blocks without having to deal with the configuration of React, Webpack, Babel, etc. With just three command lines, you can get started with your actual project in less than two minutes. 

Personally, I particularly like the clear documentation. And that it works brilliantly and simply out of the box.

Link to the repo

2 GenerateWP - WordPress Code Generator

When it comes to creating custom themes and plugins for WordPress, there are some tedious tasks that just have to be done: for example, registering a custom_post_type with all the capabilities, queries, API endpoints and co. 

With this handy toolbox, you can generate many custom snippets for your project. It always uses the latest APIS and coding standards from WordPress - so you have at least one less thing to worry about.

Link to GenerateWP

3. the official WordPress core tickets

Actively contributing to WordPress is a huge win-win situation: on the one hand, of course, because you are supporting a free product. On the other hand, you learn a lot by working on the core software yourself and developing WordPress on a daily basis. 

You will also be able to develop themes, plugins and apps for WordPress better in your day-to-day work. And if you take care of open questions about the WordPress core, you will also get to know many friendly and interesting members of the community. 

Link to the ticket tracker

For Github users, there is also a git-ified version that is synchronized with the original SVN repo.

Freebies

4. free-for.dev

There are a huge number of services and platforms with free offers for developers. However, it can be difficult to find all these services to make an informed decision. On Free-For.Dev you will find a list of software and other free offers that are interesting for developers. There are categories such as testing, hosting, email, CDN, CI/CD, code quality and many more. 

Link to the page

Plugin development

5th WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Generator

Developing a plugin is definitely fun. But setting it up later can be a pain and - depending on the size and complexity of the plugin - quite extensive. Especially if you follow the following best practices (which you should definitely do). That's exactly what this tool is for.

The boilerplate is based on the plugin API, the coding standards and the documentation standards. All you have to do is enter a unique name for your plugin, your slug and your author information - and you're ready to go.

Link to the generator

6th WP React Starter: WordPress React Boilerplate

If you want to do a little more (JavaScript) in plugin development and want it to be based on React, this very comprehensive tool is for you.

You can start creating plugins with React, Typescript and integrated CI/CD in no time and without the extensive creation of a build.

Basics of the boilerplate:

• React frontend for reactive user interfaces (with PHP fallback as server-side rendering)
• TypeScript for type-safe front-end development
• OOP-PHP with namespaces for clear backend development
• Docker development environment without lengthy build process
• CI/CD integration for automated code quality checks and integrated release management (e.g. for the wordpress.org repo)

Link to the repo

Theme development

7th State Of The Art WordPress Theme Development Boilerplate

There are countless boilerplates for WordPress theme development, but this one is just terrific. It utilizes all the great and new web dev extensions - such as Browsersync, Linters, Babel, Autoprefixer and many more. And all without forcing you to learn a new workflow or syntax.

Plus, with this foundation, you really are up to date with the latest WordPress and OOP standards. You only need about five lines in your command input to set up the boilerplate and get it up and running. 

The creation process is also easy to maintain and follows the WordPress coding standards. 

Link to the repo

Learning

8th Awesome Falsehood

Did you know that customer/[email protected] is a valid e-mail address? What about matthias\@\held@[email protected]? Or did you know that personal names can also contain numbers in some cultures? 

Personally, I have learned more from this list than I could have learned from most test cases. A select list of fantastic falsehoods that many programmers believe in. So it makes sense to rethink your own developer mindset across boundaries. 

Link to the repo

Testing

9th Big List of Naughty Strings

This resource is for testers. 

I firmly believe that every WordPress developer should be a tester to some extent. Whether that means testing their code "just" for UX or - more importantly - for security. 

You can invest as much as you want in testing your code. It gets trickier when real users come into play... You'll do things you never thought possible - especially when it comes to user input. 

This repo contains a huge list of strings that are known to cause problems when entered by a user. There are also some strings that will help you with the security of your theme/plugin/application, for example strings for SQL injection, enumeration and clickjacking.

Link to the repo

10. FakerPress - WordPress Plugi

Another thing to test: It's great to create a new theme or plugin. But creating the corresponding content for it is not. And that's exactly what this plugin takes care of: it can create dummy content for almost anything in WordPress and is constantly being developed further. It also helps you to detect errors and unwanted functions that could happen if a user does this or that. 

• Contributions
• Custom Post Types
• Metadata
• Selected pictures
• Users
• Keywords
• Categories
• Comments
• User-defined comment types

Link to the plugin

Career Boosting

11th Tech Interview Handboo

If you want to land a job as a WordPress developer at an agency or tech company, you will most likely have a job interview. While some applicants are more relaxed, job interviews are a stressful situation for others. This repo will help you prepare. It covers many aspects, such as:

• How to prepare for coding interviews
• Cheat sheets for interviews
• Algorithm tips & best practices for questions
• Questions and answers about the job interview
• Tips for the perfect CV
• and much more

Link to the repo

Thanks for reading. If you know of any other resources you can't live without as a WordPress developer, feel free to leave me a comment!