What tools do MeFi web devs use for large-ish projects?
February 13, 2019 10:52 AM   Subscribe

Hi ALl, I have a new job fixing front-end web accessibility for a large-ish project, with several components spread across a big directory structure. Yay! It's a mix of PHP templates, javascript, CSS< and a couple other languages I'm less concerned with.

I'm wondering what tools people use to keep track of this kind of thing? I'm familiar-ish with the command line, but not as familiar with web-specific tools that might be available. THe project uses Github, but that doesn't make it easy to figure out, say, where a specific template entry is stored. I have a local copy of the app and am slowly coming to grips with the way its front end is put together.

Any insights from people more experienced with this kind of thing would be greatly appreciated.
posted by Alensin to Computers & Internet (11 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Jetbrains IDE products (PHPStorm, Webstorm, etc — pick your language of choice and get additional languages via extensions) provide decently good code discovery. Once it indexes the project you can use keyboard shortcuts to jump to class/variable definitions and search to find things across the project. Not free however.

On the command line, grep is your new best friend.
posted by cgg at 10:57 AM on February 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


For a mixed language project, I would not hesitate to recommend Visual Studio Code - it has extensions that will cover all the languages you mentioned, and can do intellisense. It's also definitely the new hotness in web development, and is free but still very well supported by Microsoft and a lively plugin ecosystem.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 11:26 AM on February 13, 2019 [10 favorites]


I use Sublime 3 for similar stuff. For local code, the find in file(s) functions let me search for any random string in all the codebase, and then jump to that file.
posted by contrarian at 11:27 AM on February 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


Seconding Visual Studio Code. I use it as a hyper-augmented text editor and it's great at contextualising individual files and functions within a project.
posted by holgate at 11:50 AM on February 13, 2019


THe project uses Github, but that doesn't make it easy to figure out, say, where a specific template entry is stored.

Are they using a particular PHP framework? Part of this may be easier if you look through the documentation for the framework they're using. The organizational structure at that point may make more sense, if it's reasonably opinionated. (Opinionated frameworks, basically, say that certain things always need to be organized a certain way.) So if it's a standard web framework, once you know where, for example, the URL routing is stored, you can go there to find what controller processes the URL you're looking at, and from there to what views the controller is calling.
posted by Sequence at 11:59 AM on February 13, 2019


I use WebStorm (PHPStorm in this case) and have used VSCode both are great solutions which makes things like tracking file dependencies and finding stuff easy.

Both allow you to do things like select functions and trace it back to files etc (in Webstorm, Hit shift twice, type function/classname, find file etc). The tooling in both has been eye opening after using Sublime for years.
posted by bitdamaged at 12:01 PM on February 13, 2019


Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestions, all. I've got VS Code and will give it a look, I'm not convinced it's going to be as accessible as I'd like with my preferred screen reader, but so it goes.

Framework-wise it seems to use Zend, which is a system I wasn't previously familiar with. The design document says it uses an MVC paradigm. Part of my confusion is possibly that this is my first "big,"project on which I'm more a front-end coder than a screen reader tester. I guess we all have to start somewhere.
posted by Alensin at 12:14 PM on February 13, 2019


It's wasn't clear from the question, but your comment makes it clear that you need web development tools that are inclusively designed for your own access, rather than tools that help a developer work on making a big project more accessible for its users, but may not take into consideration the accessibility needs of developers themselves.

I don't know the answer to your question but I see that you're in Seattle. You are probably already involved with the #a11y community there but it is very strong and someone there can help to guide you to the best web dev tools for your needs. I would in particular seek out the advice of Marcy Sutton (@marcysutton) or Sarah Higley (@codingchaos). And if you aren't involved yet, go to the next @a11ysea meetup!
posted by Kwine at 12:51 PM on February 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


VS Code does have some level of explicit support for screen readers, although they say that it is not available on Linux, and they have active testing for accessibility and respond to reported bugs, so hopefully you can get it working for yourself.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 3:32 PM on February 13, 2019


If you are on Twitter this might be a good question to ask at the guys from shopTalkShow (Dave Rupert and Chris Coyier). I don’t know that they will have an answer but the people who follow them may.

Best of luck finding a good tool!
posted by kellygrape at 5:19 PM on February 13, 2019


I love sublime 3 but prepare to be underwhelmed by it out of the box. It's power comes from the various packages you can add to it.
posted by sodium lights the horizon at 7:12 AM on February 15, 2019


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