
Show HN: Theme Juice – A desktop app for local WordPress development - ezekg
This whole product really is a labor of love to the WordPress community from myself. I&#x27;ve always wanted to somehow be a part of pushing the WordPress community towards using modern build tools, package management, version control and of course, proper deployments.<p>What started as a tiny command line script that automated my own personal local dev workflow and has since grown into a rather robust WordPress development toolkit, handling everything from configuring a dev environment, wrangling build tools, all the way to painless SSH deployments.<p>Though it hasn&#x27;t gained much traction, I believe this project has the chops to become a powerful stable in any WP developer&#x27;s tool belt.<p>The desktop application is built on top of our open source command line utility, tj, as well as our open source Graft virtual machine (loosely based off of VVV). Together, these tools allow you to easily create, manage and deploy local WordPress development sites, regardless of your comfort with the command line.<p>The Theme Juice desktop app aims to simplify the convoluted and rather unenjoyable process of developing WordPress projects locally by wrapping everything up into a beautiful soon-to-be-cross-platform desktop app (MacOS only for our initial v1.0 release).<p>I&#x27;d love to hear any feedback you have.<p>Link: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.themejuice.it
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mcbetz
This is a potential and promising competitor to DesktopServer
([https://serverpress.com/get-desktopserver/](https://serverpress.com/get-
desktopserver/)) which I've been a long-time user of. It just added support
for WP-CLI and relies on XAMPP. Theme Juice looks more promising as it does
not touch my root system but comes as a virtual machine. Another advantage of
Theme Juice seems to be built-in deployment. DS does not help with that. I
have been using WordMove for that task and wonder whether Capistrano is really
the better alternative.

But I also have some critical things to say about Theme Juice. First, the
name. Theme Juice sounds like a premium WP theme vendor. I sense why want to
use "Juice" but "Theme" should definitely not be there. Another big issue is
that you do not support PHP7. I am pretty sure that most professional
WordPress developers now only start with PHP7 as the advantages are huge and
the downsides negleticable. And for projects big enough to need a local dev,
constraints on servers should not be an issue as you are most probably either
running an own server (where you can choose your own PHP settings) or are
using a solid WP host like WPEngine, Pagely or Pantheon which all support
PHP7.

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tn1
It's like PeopleSoft Application Designer, but then for WordPress

