#68 – Chris Reynolds on Why To Use Composer With WordPress

On the podcast today we have Chris Reynolds. Chris has been working with WordPress for over 15 years, and is now at Pantheon as a CMS Ecosystem engineer, and WordPress technical lead. He’s spoken at WordCamps and at OpenWest about all aspects of WordPress. He's here to talk about Composer and what it can do to assist you with your WordPress website workflow. I suspect that many of the people listening to this podcast are not using Composer, and to Chris, this is something that you should think about implementing. We then get into the weeds of what Composer is, and the benefits that it brings. It’s essentially a package management system and makes it easy to set dependencies for your project and manage them within Composer. Chris describes scenarios in which he thinks Composer is a good fit; if you want to add in specific packages, and how those packages are managed and updated. He explains how you can install Composer depending on the OS that you’re working with, and how it structures the files and directories that are created. If you’ve thought about using a package management system such as Composer, this episode is for you.