Automagical Code Checking

“Given enough eyeballs, all problems are shallow”

— Linus Torvalds on the nature of open source software.

Other developers have been bitten by more/different things than you have been.

Problems with getting other eyeballs

• Working on closed source

• Not enough other people work in the same problem area

• Reluctant about wasting others’ time

PHP Quality Assurance Toolchain

A set of projects curated at http://phpqatools.org

I’ll be focusing on PHP Code Sniffer & PHP Mess Detector

These are command-line tools

PHP Mess Detector

Opinionated code critique tool http://phpmd.org/about.html

Analyses how you use variables, functions & classes

Best to install with Composer

PHP Code Sniffers

PHP Code Sniffer checks code formatting for

• tabs vs spaces
• levels of indentation
• spaces around function inputs & operators

https://github.com/squizlabs/PHP_CodeSniffer

The makers recommend installation via PEAR, but Composer works too.

WordPress Sniffs

The WordPress Development Team has a set of sniffs for PHPCS, based on the project’s coding standards

https://github.com/WordPress-Coding-Standards/WordPress-Coding-Standards

The installation is involved, but there’s an effort to made it install by Composer

Conveniences

PHPCS & PHPMD are made to be command-line tools, but there are plenty of plugins made for your favorite text editor or development IDE.

My examples will be with Vim in the vim-phpqa plugin

Checks in WordPress

For new themes & plugins that are to be hosted on wordpress.org, they need to pass the tests coded in Theme Check and Plugin Check (though Plugin Check hasn’t been updated in a while)