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Basic Debugging Within WordPress

August 2, 2018 / Tom

As we continue to head towards working with direct debugging with Xdebug, we have a few tools at our disposal that allow us to work within WordPress itself. These aren’t meant to be replacements for any other debugging tool, but compliments to them.

I began by discussing this in the previous part of the last series. Specifically, I wrote:

Now though, we need to turn our attention to the plugins that were discussed a few posts ago. After that, we’ll eventually be working our way up to Xdebug.

But next, we’ll look at the tools available to us from within WordPress itself.

Ultimately, the goal is to look at what’s available for us to use to find problems, test code snippets, and profile our work. And several plugins make this incredibly easy (and are quite powerful) as it relates to doing just that.

When CloverCoverage Fails And Passes Simultaneously

August 1, 2018 / Tom

I’ve talked about the advantages of using GrumPHP in previous posts. One of the tools that we’ve used in projects for the last year or more is Clover.

Photo by Quentin REY on Unsplash

Some time between when we started using it and this week, it would always fail to execute every time on my local machine but not on the machine to which we were deploying our code.

And no, it wasn’t because there were incorrect directives or comments in the unit tests and it wasn’t because PHPUnit was misconfigured (it was executing all of the tests and reporting them as expected).

So what gives?

The Basics of Action Hooks in WordPress

July 31, 2018 / Tom

Anytime sometime starts to get into more advanced programming – be it in WordPress or any other framework, library, foundation, or programming language – there are times in which new concepts can often be more difficult to understand than others.

I generally have found this to be true whenever a person has learned the basics of, say, object-oriented programming but hasn’t been exposed to the nuances of certain things such as design patterns.

Case in point: I’ve written about the event-driven design pattern (or the publish-subscribe or Pub/Sub as some like to refer to it) in other posts.

Yes, there are some differences to each, but the general idea is that something happens and an event is raised and anything listening for that event, or subscribed to that event, will respond.

Photo by Claus Grünstäudl on Unsplash

This is the primary pattern that WordPress employs that allows us to quite literally hook into certain points of execution. We can generally conceptualize these as action hooks in WordPress.

Anyway, the application makes certain points available for us to add our own functionality. Once that functionality is registered, WordPress will leave its codebase, so to speak, hop into ours, then return back to ours.

It’s easy enough to understand, but what if you want to expose areas in your code that allow others to hook into your code?

Developer Fitness in 2018: Quarter 2

July 26, 2018 / Tom

Apparently, with the exception of my previous post, this is turning out to be my week to share things related to the second quarter of this year (the first being about taking some time off of social media).

Earlier this year, I talked a bit more about why I think it’s important for we, as developers who spend so much time at a desk, to focus on our health as well. Granted, this is has been compeltely focused on my own goals.

Specifically, I said:

The purpose of this post is to go a bit further into what my goals have been first the first quarter of the year, what I’m aiming to do in the second phase of the year, and some additional thoughts on the devices I’ve been using.

But this doesn’t mean it can’t translate into your own life in some capacity, right? I’m the last to say that “what works for me will work for you” because I think our body composition plays a massive role and we’re all different.

Anyway, if you’ve not read what I’ve written thus far, check out these posts first (if you have the time):

Even though I’m a bit later than planning for writing my second quarter retrospective, here it is, nonetheless.

Reading and Understanding WordPress Error Logs, Part 2

July 25, 2018 / Tom

Last time, we walked through the following:

configuring debug constants,
locating an error log file,
understanding how to read the log file,
understanding stack traces
understanding how to read the stack

As nice as that is, it’s still important to understand how to write data to error log from a programmatic aspect. That is to say; it’s one thing if your work throws errors, warnings, or notices.

Understanding WordPress Error Logs

It’s another thing if you want to understand how to write information to the file for research and debugging manually.

In this post, we’ll continue doing exactly that to further our understanding WordPress error logs.

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Tom McFarlin

Basic Debugging Within WordPress

When CloverCoverage Fails And Passes Simultaneously

The Basics of Action Hooks in WordPress

Developer Fitness in 2018: Quarter 2

Reading and Understanding WordPress Error Logs, Part 2