WordPress Development Guidelines

If there needs to be specific agency guidelines or processes followed during development, please ensure this is listed in the quotation received from Gooey, if not please speak to your Partnership Manager.

Development Environment

• The site will be built on a white-label domain on servers that Gooey control.
• The site will be protected by a .htaccess generated .htpassword – so the site will not be publically accessible or crawled by search engines such as Google.
• We will make no reference to Gooey anywhere in the code or database, and any email’s used for testing purposes will be white-label domains.
• No access to the code will be given until the project is signed-off. This includes temporarily disabling WordPress’s default theme editor and Add New Plugins feature.

Coding Guidelines

• Gooey will use HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript (utilising the latest version of the jQuery framework).
• The CSS will be generated using SCSS.
• All SCSS will be modular and well commented.
• All JS Libraries will be clearly marked in a ‘vendor’ folder where possible.
• CSS and JS will be concatenated and compressed for production.
• We will use Gulp for our development workflow.
• All original SCSS, JS and Gulp files will be packaged up in the build and supplied to the agency on project completion.

WordPress Theme Guidelines

• The theme will be custom coded, we do not use pre-built premium themes (i.e. Themeforest). If you would like us to use your agency theme boilerplate please make your Partnership Manager aware and ensure it is listed on the quotation.
• We will not modify any WordPress core files or Plugin files.
• Where possible the theme will be built as a Flexible Content page builder, using ACF Pro and Gutenberg. You can see a demo of this here: abitgooey.com/2019/07/gutenberg-page-builder
• We will not put any code into WYSIWYG unless definitely needed (which we will explain why).
• We will make all pages and posts editable.
• We will make all global elements editable in ‘Theme Options’
• We will ensure all menus are editable via WordPress Appearance > Menus (unless a custom mega-menu whereas this will be edited in ‘Theme Options’.
• WordPress Comments will be disabled and not included in the build unless we are told to specifically do so, and are provided designs.
• We will code a default 404 page if a design is not supplied.

WordPress Plugins

We include the following plugins in our builds:

• ACF Pro
• Autoptimize
• Gravity Forms
• Wordfence
• Yoast SEO

If you would like any other plugins included (or for example; to use other plugins instead of the above i.e. Contact Form 7 instead of Gravity Forms) please let your Partnership Manager know and ensure it is listed on the quotation. Further plugins will also be add-able via the CMS on release of the build.

Testing (QA) Guidelines

• We will check the website matches the supplied designs, including any supplied mobile designs.
• We will check the website works in all major browsers: latest editions for Firefox, Chrome, Safari and for IE10+. If you would like further browser support please let your Partnership Manager know and ensure it is listed in your quotation.
• We will check the website works in a selection of devices including tablets and phones. We will test at all sizes from the first responsive break-point.
• We will check the website validates in W3C where possible.
• We will check the website has been developed with best practices including image optimisation, compression and concatenation and workable code (so external developers can easily work with the code).
• See an overview here: abitgooey.com/qa-checklist

Handover

• We can/will send the files and MYSQL via a resource such as Dropbox, Google Drive or WeTransfer.
• We can/will launch the website onto a live environment or dev environment, on a domain/server of your choosing. To do this we will require FTP and Control Panel (cPanel, Plesk etc) login details.

Read more about our processes on the Gooey Handbook.