There are a ton of new, amazing tools for building great themes quickly and even help you keep everything organized! The problem is setting them up is SCARY! How the heck does anyone install, let alone use anything that doesn't have a pretty GUI?

As themers we may not always be comfortable with setting up our environment to take full advantage of these great technologies. We can do our job without them, we just have to open up a text editor and start writing. We don't need to do all this compiling, whatever that means! Leave that to back-end devs, right?

Wrong!

We need these tools, they make us better. We will have more time to spend making the internet a prettier place to be. But first we have to set up our development environment.

In this session we will learn how to do a basic setup of a theme. We will touch on the following topics:

• why use these tools
• configuration files and what they do
• structuring a theme for automation

By the end of the session you will be able to:

• install Node.js
• configure and use Grunt for run tasks
• configure and use Bundler to download gem dependencies
• use Compass for simplify our CSS creation
• automajically download all of support files we need
• make it super simple for anyone else to download and setup

Come with and open mind and desire to figure this out once and for all. No need to have anything installed either. I plan on creating a BOF to help set up your machines after the session.

Don't be scared, I will make it easy to understand.

If figured it out, you can too!