Category: Articles (Page 124 of 258)

Those who have worked in object-oriented programming languages are likely familiar with namespacing and the benefits they provide when organizing a project. Unfortunately, namespaces in WordPress aren’t something that I’ve seen as much as in projects I’ve seen elsewhere.

And when I say “namespaces in WordPress,” I’m not talking about WordPress core. I’m talking about WordPress plugins. I think there are a variety of reasons developers don’t use namespaces (and may I’ll talk about those later); however, I’ve gotten curious about those who do use namespaces in their projects.

Specifically, I’ve been interested in the conventions that people follow, how they map their files to their namespaces, and so on.

how many of you use brackets when working with #php namespaces, or just use `namespace`, `use`, and “ to handle nesting?

— Tom McFarlin (@tommcfarlin) June 17, 2016

Though there’s likely variation in some of the things we do, I think making sure our files map to a particular directory structure is helpful when dealing with projects (especially large projects).

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In following-up with yesterday’s post on unit testing WordPress code, I ended up wanting to say more than I did. There are are a lot of things to talk about (entire books cover TDD so what could a single post offer, anyway?).

Rather than try and tackle so many things in a handful of posts, I’ll stick with writing shorter posts on a handful of these topics.

Unit Test Existing Code (or Red-Green-Refactor)

One of the things that I wanted to discuss is the how unit testing can help drive architectural decisions. The challenge with the latter, though, is that part of writing tests often comes with retrofitting tests (or how we can unit test existing code).

And this is a topic all its own.

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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 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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