Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Author: Tom (Page 159 of 428)

Architecture and Unit Testing WordPress Code

In a few recent projects, I’ve been unit testing WordPress code and doing more general test-driven development than normal. I’m no stranger to TDD, but it’s not something I am religious about using. For me, it depends on the nature of the project.

There’s a lot of writing on TDD and its advantages, and a lot of people who use it swear by it. It builds a level of quality into a project and helps with adding new features, solving bugs, and modularizing code.

Unit Testing WordPress

Unit testing WordPress code is a bit of a mixed bag, and it comes down to the fact that object-oriented code in WordPress is often tightly coupled to both the business logic and the WordPress API.

Since TDD can help designing the architecture of a project, it can help guide how we can create more testable classes.

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How To Checkout WordPress via Subversion

If you want to contribute, you’re going to need to know how to use Subversion to checkout WordPress from its Subversion repository.

Before looking into how to do that, I’d say that source control is but one of the tools that a professional developer (let alone a WordPress developer) should have at his or her disposal.

So why not use this open source project to learn how to do just that?

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Debug WordPress with Kint PHP Debugger

When working to debug WordPress projects, I’m personally a fan of using Codebug (something I should probably write about a bit later), but it’s more of a general debugger than one specifically tailored for WordPress.

If you’re looking for the later, then there’s a solid plugin available from Tonya Mork (of Know The Code) that brings the features of Kint Debugger into a WordPress plugin.

For those who have never used a professional-grade debugger, this is a great way to get started with going beyond the standard print_r and var_dump statements that so many often use to locate problems.

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Scheduled Post Shortcut for WordPress

Scheduled Post Shortcut for WordPress is officially available in the WordPress Plugin Repository and is the second plugin that’s officially available via Pressware.

A few months ago, Easier Excerpts was a plugin that was released to help make it just a little bit easier to manage excerpts when composing blog posts.

Scheduled Post Shortcut is another plugin that attempts to stay in the same vein of simplicity while also making it easier to streamline the publishing process.

But what does that mean and what’s the story behind the plugin?

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A Look at Freemius Checkout

At the end of last year, I had the chance to meet Vova Feldman and see what he was working on with Freemius. It was a cool product, to be sure, and it’s been neat to see it take off over the last few months.

Just as I did with Freemius, I had a chance to see what else Vova has been working on and this time it’s something geared towards those who are selling products via their site.

Thus, there’s the aptly named Freemius Checkout. This product is geared specifically to those who are looking to sell plugins or themes.

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