Introducing Evolve Framework

Over time, we’ve gained a little experience concerning WordPress development. Between successes and failures, and things that turned out pretty well while others not so much, we’ve had one and only constant: the necessity to have a shared set of tools that we could use across projects.

For a certain amount of time, we’ve followed a drop-in approach, which means importing the same folder containing the entire toolset in each and every theme we’ve been developing.

It must be said that the folder was under version control in a different repository than the rest of the project. Anyway, at some point we realized the obvious: that approach would allow us to get only that much far, and certainly didn’t offer an answer to the ever present problem of separating form, content and functionality.

So we’ve decided to create a plugin. If you go and search for “WordPress framework” on Google or Github you’ll find various examples of how the same problem can be tackled. Some even stick with the drop-in idea, probably not incurring in the issues we’ve had in the past.

Funnily enough, two things happen when browsing other people’s projects:

1. you admire the elegance of their code, since said code hasn’t yet had the chance to bore you,
2. you verify that no one does the things you want, the way you’d like them to be done.

So, since we’re wired our own way, we chose to create a development framework for WordPress products too: Evolve Framework.

The plugin is public and you can find it here.

The reason why the project was put on Github represents the other big change that we want to bring in our work process.

There’s no real reason to keep things for yourself, being afraid that someone else might steal your precious ideas: experience proves that we all can obtain much greater rewards when information is shared.

We started to get documentation in order as well, so make sure you have a look at it.

Right now we’d like to receive some feedback on the project, so don’t hesitate to contact us to share your opinion on it.

For now we haven’t made up our minds yet around how people are going to contribute, and even the idea of a future roadmap for the project is vague at best.

Surely, though, external contribution regarding translation is welcome: if you’re available, again, hit us up!