Category: Articles (Page 124 of 258)

As much as I love how easy it is to create a project on top of WordPress and release it into one of the free repositories, there are certain aspects of development that are neglected.

Case in point: testing.

And though I’ve been talking a little bit about unit testing, there are also other types of testing such as acceptance testing, integration testing, black-box testing, and so on.

This is not the type of black-box I had in mind.

All of the above are ways that we can go about ensuring a high degree of quality is built into our projects. Sometimes, I think we forgo these things for the sake of shipping something more quickly.

Other times, I think that we neglect to do them because writing tests is not as much fun as actually building a project. In other cases, I think that we opt not to test because we don’t have the proper education around the tooling for how to do so.

Don’t get me wrong: I have a much better track record of writing tests around client projects that I do about some of my public plugins (save for Easier Excerpts and Scheduled Post Shortcut which are done by Eric and myself), so I’m working to change that.

But if you don’t do any other type of testing, I urge you to at least try to introduce black-box testing into your development process.

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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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