SASS / Compass: Worth It For Wordpress Development?

[Planet13]

Hi all:

I know the answer is "it depends," but I am going to ask the question anyway:

Is it really all that important to learn SASS and a framework like compass if you really only plan on doing wordpress development?

Seems like it is more of a hassle than it might be worth. (Heck, it's a hassle getting Ruby installed and running on windows).

I normally use Genesis Framework for wordpress, and the main stylesheet is only like 29K, and my child stylesheets are generally around that size, too.

On the other hand, I really hate having to do repetitive -moz and -webkit stuff for when I change a border radius or someething.

Maybe there is an easy gui for sass that is... um... free?

Thanks in advance.

[Nutter]

I've been using SASS with NetBeans for the last few projects and, now that I'm past the training wheel stage, it seems like I'm much more efficient with CSS. I let NetBeans take care of doing the compilation every time I save my scss files. Didn't have to install Ruby. I think I just installed the plugin into NB and it worked.

Biggest advantage I've found is that nesting seems to make more sense to me when it's done through SASS. I also tend to use the second from most compressed format so the files get a bit shorter. And stuff like the mixins for border radius make it much easier to play around with properties that behave differently in different browsers.

Biggest downside is that I haven't come across a really good way to keep the WordPress header as part of the compiled CSS file while still being able to use one of the compressed formats.

[Planet13]

hi there, nutter.

Thanks for the reply. Do you use sass with child themes? Or do you just use SASS when you develop a new theme? Thanks in advance.

I think that it might be overkill for using with just child theme style sheets.

[Nutter]

I've been using it for pretty much anything recently. I had a plugin I was working on for Moodle that only needed a bit of CSS so I started by just doing plain CSS. Turns out the CSS was becoming a bit overwhelming and I wished I had started with SASS. Now, I just default to using it.

[Planet13]

Ok, good to hear.

There are some themes I am working with that have bigger CSS files than the official genesis themes I normally work with, so I will look into it again.

Thanks much.