Setting up the boilerplate in UNIX

Setting up the boilerplate for the first time might take a while, here are the steps I used in order to get it up and running in a repeatable and generic manner using the UNIX terminal, should work in most Linux distros as well as OSX. I'll assume you work in ~/workspace but you must replace this part with your actual workplace.

We'll do the following things:

• Clone the repository
• Rename it and remove the git repository
• Create a soft link to our plugin trunk folder
• Rename all files
• Replace most of the "Plugin Name" occurrences inside our plugin files
• Create a new clean git repository for our plugin

Let's start!

$ cd ~/workspace
$ git clone https://github.com/tommcfarlin/WordPress-Plugin-Boilerplate.git
$ mv WordPress-Plugin-Boilerplate my-plugin
$ rm -rf my-plugin/.git

Now we need a name for our plugin, in this example, I'll name it my-plugin, the idea is to easily replace plugin-name everywhere inside the plugin repo.

$ cd ~/workspace/my-wordpress/wp-content/plugins
$ ln -s ~/workspace/my-plugin/plugin-name/trunk my-plugin

Let's now, let's update the plugin name:

$ cd my-plugin
# Update file names
$ mv plugin-name.php my-plugin.php
$ rename 's/plugin-name/my-plugin/' **/**/*
# Update reference inside all .php files
$ find . -name "*.php" -exec sed -i 's/plugin-name/my-plugin/g' {} \;
$ find . -name "*.php" -exec sed -i 's/Plugin_Name/My_Plugin/g' {} \;

And that's it! Now we set up our git repo and we're done.

$ git init
$ git add --all
$ git commit -m "Initial commit"

Note that there are still some function names and comments that you'll want to manually update, but at least this takes care of the biggest burden.