Workflows and stuff you use.

hargi

hargi

hargi

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19 Jul 2006
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Just interested to know you work flows.
I get things done, but I think I'm a bit behind the times, when CSS first started to come out I was like whats the point in that, its extra work. Why not use tables instead of divs. Any ways when I got into it I saw the real benefits of it.

Anyway's at the moment use Visual Studio2010 for database application I'm making.
But if i'm doing a website I just normally get some webspace and work directly on the web either by sublime and filezilla or the inbuilt cpanel editor.
I have used a LAMP xampp before but normally miss that out and do it online

I've noticed people on here talk about GIT, and VM's is there things I should be doing and using instead of the way im doing it now?

What do you do?

Cheers
 
I personally believe it comes down to each individual.

There are different areas, i.e. you mention Git which is distributed version/source control, with SVN and Mercurial being other options. Do you need source control? Probably if you want to save the headaches later on if you're building larger websites / applications. Do you need a distributed vcs or a single local/hosted repository?

In terms of development, LAMP stacks are fantastic for web work using PHP, MySQL, RoR etc, for ASP.NET they are fairly limited (if any use at all). The advantage of Visual Studio is that it has a built in web server to test your creations.

VMs are great but it depends if you need to go that indepth?

What's your goal?
 
I:
- build nearly everything in Sublime.
- integrate what I've built into a VS2013 solution for CMS (usually Kentico or Sitecore).
- use SVN for source control.

For front end, I:
- use SASS with Compass.
- use Gulp to automate much of the build process.
(launch a livereload server in the background to inject changes as I make them, compile SASS, run through the compiled CSS and vendor prefix any CSS3 that needs it, lint, minify and concatenate js, optimise images, etc.)
 
I was impressed with VS2010 I had been doing a project with codeigniter and mysql. CodeIgniter was the first framework I had looked at and used it seamed to make things a lot easier then pure PHP but I got stuck. But the ease at which I could recreate it in Visual Studios I was amazed. Love the face that it creates view and that for you. Again this was my first MVC project.

I suppose I really should use version control but there is only me that works on the code, but it is a pain when something needs to be reverted back.

Is SASS worth it?

My goal is to start to do things properly or at least more how its done in industry.
 
hargi said:
Is SASS worth it?
Click to expand...

SASS or Less is SO WORTH IT it literally saves me days of work sometimes and everything is very neat and organised.

If you don't wanna do a lot of the CSS then frameworks are a great cover, I use them a lot of rapid development, here are a few of my favourites.

http://getbootstrap.com/
http://foundation.zurb.com/
http://gumbyframework.com/

My general work flow is Sublime Text for all my coding, and Netbeans for debugging, I like to use it more for xDebug and its indexing helps a lot.

Plugins I would recommend for Sublime Text:

Package Control - lets you install most plugins quickly inside of Sublime
DocBlockr - Easy doc blocks.
Emmet - Super charge your HTML e.g.

Code: 
div.wrapper>ul>li*5

becomes

<div class="wrapper">
    <ul>
        <li></li>
        <li></li>
        <li></li>
        <li></li>
        <li></li>
    </ul>
</div>

Also take a look at this video, it teaches you how amazing sublime text is.

http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/news/perfect-workflow-in-sublime-text-free-course/

For organising work I use Trello.com, form the same guys that FogBugz but it actual works, have really nice UI and is responsive with Tablet and Mobile apps.
 
Fallen god said:
SASS or Less is SO WORTH IT it literally saves me days of work sometimes and everything is very neat and organised.

My general work flow is Sublime Text for all my coding, and Netbeans for debugging, I like to use it more for xDebug and its indexing helps a lot.

Plugins I would recommend for Sublime Text:

Package Control - lets you install most plugins quickly inside of Sublime
DocBlockr - Easy doc blocks.
Emmet - Super charge your HTML e.g.
Click to expand...

Completely agree with you here, Sublime text + Zen coding (I assume now called Emmet) change everything when working with html/css

Less as you mentioned is another thing that I now can't live without. Saves me hours and hours of time when nesting css. Also the variable system is great, makes changing a single color of something for a client quick and easy.
 
hargi said:
Is SASS worth it?
Click to expand...

If you write a lot of CSS, then YES YES YES!!!!

Not only does it make writing CSS faster, but it can also help greatly with responsive design.
I've built my own framework for internal use and it utilises Susy, which is a great grid system.

Imagine you have a container that needs to have rows of 4 in it, but you don't know how many total items might actually be put in. With Susy, it's as simple as...

Code: 
.itemsToBeFluid {
  @include span-columns(3,12);
  &:nth-child(4n){
    @include omega;
  }
}
(The above will give you perfect rows of 4 based on a 960 grid, with each 4th item sitting flush against the right side. No slight/1px differences - everything will line up perfectly)

With SASS, it's also easy to keep your CSS DRY but without having to resort to a ton of style classes polluting your HTML. LOVE!!!
 
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cypto said:
Less as you mentioned is another thing that I now can't live without. Saves me hours and hours of time when nesting css. Also the variable system is great, makes changing a single color of something for a client quick and easy.
Click to expand...

Love Variables, you can now define all your theme constant in a few seconds, and change them so easily. We currently at work have 100 sites all using the same Less files and just overwrite the defaults, they all have very unique looks. Things like this with CSS would be such a pain.

Also when you look into grid systems the support for functions makes it so much easier. Something like Semantic.gs that I just used for a quick prototype has a fully working grid system in 65 lines, a lot of which is comments. Simply amazing.

Also when you combine that fact that everything has to be processed to CSS and thus tested to some extent it helps you make sure everything is actually valid CSS and you don't miss something somewhere and pull your hair out wondering why your design is so messed up. I generally have a terminal window running GruntJS to tests and compile my Less into CSS, combined with Recess it can make sure everything is really well styled. and everything is run for lint.
 
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Photoshop, MAMP, CodeKit, Coda2 and Gitbox are the basis of my workflow.

SASS is so worth it. I'm particularly liking Bourbon Neat at the moment for responsive grids.
 
BFCTom said:
SASS is so worth it. I'm particularly liking Bourbon Neat at the moment for responsive grids.
Click to expand...

Thats a really nice lightweight framework, my favourite grid is the Bootstrap one, it's mobile first and offers you 4 breakpoints which is very flexible, and tie visible-(size) and not visible-(size) are really good for including clearfix and hiding content on certain devices.
 
KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid.

Do what you need and nothing more, extra process doesn't mean you write, build, become better it just adds complexity to the entire process.

But saying that learning is fun :) but focus on one thing, your question was pretty broad but i'd certainly advise looking at some form of version control as it can be a life saver and also simplify deployments.

Checkout BitBucket or GitHub both offer free GIT hosting which is my personal preference for version control. I've been forced to use both SVN and Perforce in the past and are not great to work with on large scale teams.

If you've not gone down pre-processed CSS route take a look at that SASS has become the standard these days, but there are many other options (LESS, Stylus). Don't jump straight into frameworks (Compass, Bourbon, Suzie) learn from scratch and understand it's powers yourself.

Other pre-processor stuff like Grunt, Yeoman, brunch, gulp can be used to automate common tasks at the expense of extra build complexity.

I'm also a very big fan of template systems on front-end side of things (Twig, HAML) to allow you to build re-usable components, but then I build a lot of enterprise level stuff which require a lot of portability, consistency and simple dev process (ie: None front end guys being able to build stuff that works.)

On DB side of things you could look at NoSQL (Hadoop, Crunch, Mongo) they're all the rage these days and then you've also always got node.js which has moving very, very fast of late...

But yeah, lots of options. Just don't overload yourself as there is so movement on things these days that you can spread yourself thin.

I'd ask you "What part of your workflow do you want to improve" and go from there.
 
Cheers all for the replys,
It was a broad question as, it's one of though I don't know what I don't know type of thing.
I'm happy with what I do.
I really need to get git working, that's the one thing I'd like to get sorted but didn't really understand it.
Phunky can you explane simply what I would use yeoman or grunt to do?
Cheers
 
Ooofff that's a hard one to nail down :D it's so open ended, you can use them together to do so much like running all your pre-processing stuff for you in one go then deploying, dependency management, the list goes on - you would be better reading up directly on there sites.

http://gruntjs.com/
http://yeoman.io/

I personally don't use either as I just don't have the requirements, plus it would be more process to keep rest of team up to date with, although I could actually use these to automate everything for people so they didn't even need to care about some stuff, but never going to get the time to do that sadly.
 
Phunky said:
I personally don't use either as I just don't have the requirements, plus it would be more process to keep rest of team up to date with, although I could actually use these to automate everything for people so they didn't even need to care about some stuff, but never going to get the time to do that sadly.
Click to expand...

It's quite worth the initial time investment and requires little effort once setup.

I had my backend guys install Ruby, Nodejs and Compass, with Gulp and all dependencies being installed via package.json.

I then added gulp as a prebuild event in VS, so it runs automatically everytime they build.
This means that they can just forget about it, unless they're editing a scss or js file, in which case they only need to open a cmd prompt and type in 'gulp watch'.
 
OK Tripnoligist, Phunky.
After looking at those sites I'm still not sure what they do. I have not touched things like handlebars, node or coffeescript as yet. Would you recommend I look at them first before going into gulp and yeoman?
Looking at the site it looks like they do a lot of stuff which must be good for big projects.
For starting out what would be the first thing i would use them for?
 
I use Grunt as a sort of package management for the frontend i.e. download version X of jquery and so on. I also use it to process and compile all the JS and Less files into 1 CSS and JS file. It is also good for setting up tests, and I use https://github.com/twitter/recess which tests/styles your css for your.
 
My setup is.

Photoshop, Illustrator, WAMP, PuTTY, WinSCP, Heidi SQL, Jetbrains PHPStorm, Compass installed via Ruby for PHPStorm intergration, Codebase for Timetracking and git repos, DeployHQ for deploying git to server.

I also access everything via SSH for security.

This is based on Windows 7 64bit
 
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