[wp-hackers] Advanced Javascript development in core

[K.Adam White]

This is *awesome*, thank you for broaching the topic.

I'm very excited to check out the documentation plugin; I'm pretty familiar
with JavaScript, but WordPress is already a large JS codebase and I still
find it hard to make sense of how we do things. This looks like a very
smart and community-oriented way to begin opening up that black box to more
contributors. To paraphrase Siobhan McKeown, the more types of
documentation we have for the JS, the better! API docs and reading through
code barely work even for me, so I'd definitely support more plugin-style
documentation. We've also talked in the past about having more
usage-oriented JavaScript information in the handbook—whether or not that's
the right place for it, if we could put together some common use-cases for
the core JS code we can illustrate how those problems would be tackled.

The question of application framework is an interesting one. I'm lucky to
work with both the creator of LayoutManager
<https://github.com/tbranyen/backbone.layoutmanager> and one of the
Marionette team members, and will ask them for some feedback on this.

This may be premature, but a couple times now at WordCamps I've discussed
the possibilities of having a JS-oriented WordPress event: part lectures,
part contributor day, possibly part training. I'd be interested in helping
to organize something like that, if it's of interest to the community; I
know we'll touch on these things at the dev summit, WCSF, and so on, but it
might be easier to work through some of the architectural questions in
person. It'd also give us a venue to pull in experts from outside the
traditional WP community to discuss the framework question.

Long story short, count me in—and I'll see how many folks I can drag along
with me!

K. Adam White
kadamwhite at gmail.com
401.575.7829


On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 9:33 AM, Eric Andrew Lewis <
eric.andrew.lewis at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've been working on the media grid feature for 4.0, and would like to talk
> about Javascript in WordPress.
>
> Our recent Javascript developments have been undoubtedly great for users.
> The Media modal is the strongest UI change we've made in recent years (not
> counting MP6 which was really a fresh coat of paint). However, becoming a
> core javascript developer has a steep learning curve, and working with any
> of the media code has confounded most WordPress developers.
>
> There's reason to this - you can create top-notch themes and plugins with a
> wheelhouse of PHP/CSS/HTML, without diving deep into modern Javascript
> practices.
>
> Even if that is the case, we should make a better developer experience in
> our Javascript stack, and transition WP developers into an era of
> Javascript development smoothly.
>
> The biggest changes we should make are discussing architectural decisions
> and documentation.
>
> *Architectural decisions*
>
> How we structure our MV* objects is terribly important. In media and theme
> experience, we combine top-level controllers with the top-level views.
> Should we be doing this? I don't particularly think so. We should nail down
> general module structure, so that when you switch from one module to
> another there's familiar architecture. Essentially, we need a City Planning
> department for our Javascript.
>
> We need to recognize that we're still just out of the starting gate with
> our Javascript modules. Could you imagine if you had the opportunity to
> discuss the creation of WP_Query in 2005? That's where we are.
>
> *Documentation*
>
> Without documentation it's just interpretive dance. We probably shouldn't
> accept code to core that doesn't have enough documentation - although that
> begs the question "what is enough?"
>
> I made an interactive documentation plugin for Media
> <https://github.com/ericandrewlewis/wp-media-javascript-guide>, with live
> examples in the browser right next to the boilerplate code. Maybe we should
> consider more documentation that sits inside of WordPress, rather than
> abstracting it out.
>
> *Application Framework*
>
> We currently use Backbone.js as an MV* utility library, and build
> abstractions on top of it. There are a slew of application frameworks on
> the JS scene, including Marionette.js which builds on top of Backbone. Do
> you think we should adopt one? We are reinventing the wheel in a lot of
> ways. We roll our own region management, custom events bussing, and
> handling subviews - all out of the box in any app framework. We can
> eliminate boilerplate by using composite/collection views, and provide for
> more reusable subcomponents with something like behaviors
> <http://marionettejs.com/docs/marionette.behavior.html>.
>
>
> Eric Andrew Lewis
> ericandrewlewis.com
> 610.715.8560
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