DigitalBlake

WordPress and PHP Development

WordPress and PHP have been the center of my work for most of my career. Fifteen years of it, across agencies and in-house teams, building and migrating sites that other people had to maintain long after I moved on. The deep client work, the custom Gutenberg blocks and the thousand-page migrations, lives in my case studies. This guide is the groundwork underneath it: the standards, the language, and the tooling that keep WordPress and PHP work maintainable.

Here is the thing I have learned about WordPress development specifically. The platform makes it very easy to write code that works and is a mess to maintain. The difference between a WordPress developer you want on a team and one you do not is rarely about knowing the API. It is about discipline: consistent standards, code the next person can actually read, and a setup that catches mistakes before a human reviewer has to.

That is what these articles are about. None of them are flashy. They are the unglamorous foundation that makes everything built on top of it hold up.

Coding standards

When you work on a team, "good code" cannot be a matter of opinion. It has to be a standard that a tool enforces, so reviews are about logic instead of brace placement. These cover setting up PHP_CodeSniffer and the WordPress Coding Standards so the linter flags problems while you type.

  • Setting up WordPress Coding Standards (WPCS) Globally

    Coding a WordPress theme can be difficult when work on a team. And it's for this reason you should have a standard way to determine what quality code should look like. Learn how to setup the WordPress Coding Standard to help assist your team in writing maintainable code.

  • Setting up PHPCS in Sublime Text 3

    Learn how to install the Sublime Text 3 PHPCS linter packages and view errors/warnings while you type your code.

Language and dependencies

The PHP language features worth knowing and the Composer commands I reach for to manage dependencies across projects.

  • Common Composer Commands

    These are notes on using composer and basic commands that I commonly use to update, remove, and query packages.

  • Features New to PHP7

    A few new PHP7 features that would be useful for frontend developers.

Editor workflow

Small editor investments that pay back every day. Custom snippets for the boilerplate you type over and over.

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