by David Arceneaux
— Linus Torvalds on the nature of open source software.
Other developers have been bitten by more/different things than you have been.
Working on closed source
Not enough other people work in the same problem area
Reluctant about wasting others’ time
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
Opinionated code critique tool http://phpmd.org/about.html
Analyses how you use variables, functions & classes
Best to install with Composer
PHP Code Sniffer checks code formatting for
https://github.com/squizlabs/PHP_CodeSniffer
The makers recommend installation via PEAR, but Composer works too.
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
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
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)