Support Forums: Improve local environment support

[Clorith]

Currently the foums theme (and many other meta elements really), rely on the global header and footer fetched via a call to require WPORGPATH . 'header.php and require WPORGPATH . 'footer.php' respectively.

The global header is not open sourced, so to be able to replicate the environment locally, one would need to do something like define( 'WPORGPATH', 'https://wordpress.org/' ) and enable allow_url_fopen in PHP.

This works, but the header is then not aware of any enqueued assets or other scripts in the local environment that may need to trigger.

The attached patch adds a check if the header or footer actions have been ran in the support theme after requiring these global files, and will call wp_head() and wp_footer() if not.

[Clorith]

In addition to 5759.patch​ providing the header and footer code as mentioned, 5759.2.patch​ improves local development by adding a grunt script runner to the package.json. This allows contributors to use grunt directly from the project dependencies, instead of needing to install it globally.

[dd32]

The wporg theme which is intended on being used as a "base theme" provides a fall-back for the header/footer, could this be merged with that approach instead?

Unfortunately not all themes use that as the theme template, but I think it'd be worthwhile considering.

[Clorith]

That's a thought indeed, and I agree with you that sounds like a much cleaner solution if there's already a fallback in there.

(probably something worth checking if can be done on a grander scale for all themes when possible to ease the process for others as well?)

[dd32]

In 11581:

Support Forums: Improve local dev environment by adding the grunt script runner.

Props Clorith.
See #5759.

[dd32]

I committed 5759.2.patch​ but with the new WordPress.org header, composer will be required to load the new headers and stuff.

See ​https://github.com/WordPress/pattern-directory/commit/8e5528e21055c89f61129033807d1a63395d6504 for a change that added it to the pattern directory.

This probably means the simplest option will be to spin up an environment similar to ​https://github.com/wordpress/theme-directory-env

[Clorith]

Completely agree that this makes more sense to do as a local environment setup now.

I've been tinkering with it today, and ended up with ​https://github.com/Clorith/support-forums. This is sort of a combination of the theme and pattern directories, with some forums sprinkled on top, happy to transfer it over just give me a ping :)

Ideally, having something set up to push changes for forum-assets to dotorg would be beneficial, so this doesn't need to be manually updated either which way, but MVP's and proof of concept is a good start I think.