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  • PHPCS and WordPress: Which sniff to use?

    PHPCS and WordPress: Which sniff to use?

    Which WordPress sniff?

    When using PHPCS for checking WordPress code, there are a number of sniffs/rulesets that you can use…

    1. WordPress-Core. This cover off the WordPress core coding standards
    2. WordPress-Docs. This one checks for WordPress inline documentation standards
    3. WordPress-Extra. This is an extended set of rules with recommended best practices, not sufficiently covered in the WordPress core coding standards. In other words, above and beyond the core standards. This also includes the WordPress-Core standards.
    4. WordPress. This is a complete set with all of the sniffs – the equivalent of WordPress-Extra and WordPress-Docs

    As a developer, I’m not sure why you’d want to use anything other than the whole set, so I’d recommend using the WordPress sniffs.

    Use a VIP sniff?

    If you’re using the set-up that I documented, you’ll also have the VIP sniffs installed as well.

    WordPress VIP are an enterprise-level hosting company, dealing with some of the biggest websites there are. As a result, they have additional requirements around tighert security and better performance.

    • WordPressVIPMinimum – for use with projects on the (older) WordPress.com VIP platform.
    • WordPress-VIP-Go – for use with projects on the (newer) VIP Go platform.

    All customers have been moved off the original WordPress.com platform, so you should only really use WordPress-VIP-Go.

    These rulesets contain only the rules which are considered to be “errors” and “warnings” and use rules from the WordPress Coding Standards (WPCS) project, as well as the VariableAnalysis standard. VIP have certain differences on their platform which may mean that certain things don’t work (e.g. they have a mainly read-only file system), so these sniffs will highlight this and offering up links to documentation and general solutions.

    I would recommend using this sniff along with WordPress.

    How to check which sniffs you have

    On the command line run phpcs -i to view the sniffs that you have installed locally. This is my output…

    The installed coding standards are MySource, PEAR, PSR1, PSR2, PSR12, Squiz, Zend, WordPress-VIP-Go, WordPressVIPMinimum, PHPCompatibility, PHPCompatibilityParagonieRandomCompat, PHPCompatibilityParagonieSodiumCompat, PHPCompatibilityWP, Modernize, NormalizedArrays, Universal, PHPCSUtils, VariableAnalysis, WordPress, WordPress-Core, WordPress-Docs and WordPress-Extra
  • YouTube Embed: One of the Best WordPress Video Player Plugins to Try in 2023

    YouTube Embed: One of the Best WordPress Video Player Plugins to Try in 2023

    WordPress theme company, Astra, have reviewed video player WordPress plugins and consider my very own YouTube Embed to be one of the best.

    And, to be fair, it was a tough crowd. Whereas YouTube Embed is specifically just for YouTube videos and then only using the capabilities of Google’s own API, the rest of the list were not such constrained, often providing their-own bespoke players for any kind of video.

    Never-the-less to be regarded amongst the others, many of which are commercial offerings, was an honour. Indeed, their favourite was listed at position 1, but they don’t make it clear if their “Top 10” is in order. If it is, my plugin is number 3, which makes even better. And, the top 2 are both commercial, paid-only options. Whatever the case here, they had little negative to say other than the fact that the plugin makes use of shortcodes.

    If you’re looking for a powerful method of embedding your YouTube videos in WordPress, you know where to look!

  • How to add PHPCS checking to Visual Studio Code

    How to add PHPCS checking to Visual Studio Code

    If you’re rocking VS Code and would like to automate PHPCS checking from within the editor, look no further.

    Not installed PHPCS yet? Check out my guide first. Once that’s done, thankfully, the process to do this is quite simple…

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  • Installing PHPCS on MacOS

    Installing PHPCS on MacOS

    If you’re developing for WordPress then, in my opinion, use of PHPCS to help validate your code is critical.

    However, anyone can develop without necessarily being a whizz with the command line (and I include myself in that bracket). So, having just gone through a PHPCS install with a freshly-baked MacBook, I thought I’d share the process. If only for me the next time I do it.

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  • Enemy of the (business) people

    Enemy of the (business) people

    Positions such as yours take [away] even the slightest incentive for plugin creators to create great plugins for free

    This was feedback given to me in the WordPress.org forums after I left poor feedback for a plugin. I’ll write about the specifics of this separately, but essentially a plugin was doing some particularly nasty advertising practices which, I believe, are against the guidelines. It’s also been reported to the Plugin Review team so I’ll leave it up to them to be the final arbiter.

    But, yes, the developer didn’t take the review well.

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