Every complex development project has dependencies, and WordPress is no exception: While the core codebase takes the worry out of managing many JavaScript libraries, you still have to manage all your plugins and themes. If you’ve just got one site to worry about, manually taking care of tracking and updating these dependencies is easy, but as soon as you’re managing multiple sites it starts to become cumbersome — and managing dependencies is especially hard when you’re working with in Multisite.

There are several ways to approach managing your dependencies: You can have a zip folder of them; keep them all in a Git repo; use more advanced Git techniques like submodules or subtrees; or use something like TGM Plugin Activation library. You can also use a Composer — the standard PHP dependency management tool — to manage your WordPress site dependencies.

This session will walk you through managing your WordPress dependencies using modern tools like Git, WP-CLI, and Composer, making maintenance easier and decreasing the amount of third-party code you have to store in your repo or code management tool. You should come away knowing a few different approaches to make dependency management both less work and less prone to problems and mistakes.