My Workflow – Coda 2

So I received a question a few days ago about my workflow and I am more than happy to share the tools and workflows that I use to get things done.  By no means am I or my workflows perfect and I’m constantly adjusting and testing to make them better. If you’ve got advice or see an issue, I’d love to hear about!

My Code Editor

I use Coda 2 by Panic.  It’s a great editor with lots of bells and whistles as well as a pretty great collection of add-ons and themes created by the community.

I started my career in 2007 using Dreamweaver CS2.  That was what the company I worked for had a license of and there was no room in the budget for anything else.  I had no web developer experience and started by working with the drag and drop editor.  About 2 weeks in I realized that it just wasn’t going to cut it and started to play around with the table-based layouts in HTML.  This led to my first live website and increased learning on the fundamentals of HTML and CSS.  Over the course of the next few months I learned div based development, added JavaScript to my skills and improved upon all three.  I also added WordPress to our companies list of tools and began to learn PHP.

Fast-forward 4 years and I had graduated college and got a job at a much larger nonprofit as a dedicated web developer.  I suddenly had options in terms of IDE and decided to go with Coda 2 after a few months of research.

Coda has some awesome features including a full integrated CLI and SQL GUI.  While I mostly use Terminal for these functions I have found them useful occasionally.  Coda also integrates with both Git and SVN although again, I use Terminal for my integrations as I focused very hard on learning Terminal and the command-line in 2014.

One of my favorite features is the built-in transmit sFTP integration.  You don’t need a separate application to do file pushing and pulling.  While this has become less of a plus for me since starting to use Git hooks to push code to servers at work, I still love that I can sFTP from my editor and its lightning fast!

There are a few cons that I’ve found in Coda 2 but haven’t been a big enough issue for me to switch to something else.  First, because of all the features and some bloat, the application can be slow at times.  Especially when opening and closing large sites and files such as large, minified CSS files as coda is trying to both open and parse for theming and help text.  Secondly, I haven’t found a good LESS compiler for Coda that I like. While there are two available (that I’ve found) neither works quite like I need it to.

Overall, I love Coda for developing WordPress themes and plugins as well as the other web development that I do.  It’s beautiful, feature-rich, and allows me to work quickly and efficiently.  What’s your IDE of choice?  See something I missed in Coda?  Have a favorite Coda Plugin?  Let me know in the comments!