The entire Yeoman ecosystem will probably seem like "overtooling" then :)
WordPress is simple, yes, but a distributed team workflow with complex tools with WordPress is extremely difficult without these tools.
Here are the problems we've had without these tools:
- Our large WordPress sites existed on the single, live server. Installing plugins, uploading themes, fixing bugs, etc. always carried a huge risk, especially when something breaks but you wouldn't know until caching cleared.
- Every developer (out of a team of ~12), to work on the site, had their own LAMP/MAMP setup, some using WordPressMU, none using Vagrant, and many struggling to get a copy of the database & import it (which is difficult for a lot of WP devs).
- Because of the complexity in setting up & deployment, building semi-complex applications on top of WP was incredibly difficult, mainly because of lack of consistency between environments
- The staging environments that we did have were still out of date, and had a different .htaccess with basic auth for (pseudo) privacy. This got modified, erased, or erroneously "deployed" to production countless times. Not to mention issues with Google indexing a preview server for our distributed team.
Now this "overtooling" should make a lot more sense :)
For example, migrating a site between two servers can now be done by any member of the tech team with a couple of commands, and without worry!
WordPress is simple, yes, but a distributed team workflow with complex tools with WordPress is extremely difficult without these tools.
Here are the problems we've had without these tools:
- Our large WordPress sites existed on the single, live server. Installing plugins, uploading themes, fixing bugs, etc. always carried a huge risk, especially when something breaks but you wouldn't know until caching cleared.
- Every developer (out of a team of ~12), to work on the site, had their own LAMP/MAMP setup, some using WordPressMU, none using Vagrant, and many struggling to get a copy of the database & import it (which is difficult for a lot of WP devs).
- Because of the complexity in setting up & deployment, building semi-complex applications on top of WP was incredibly difficult, mainly because of lack of consistency between environments
- The staging environments that we did have were still out of date, and had a different .htaccess with basic auth for (pseudo) privacy. This got modified, erased, or erroneously "deployed" to production countless times. Not to mention issues with Google indexing a preview server for our distributed team.
Now this "overtooling" should make a lot more sense :)
For example, migrating a site between two servers can now be done by any member of the tech team with a couple of commands, and without worry!