Category: Articles (Page 32 of 258)

Personal opinions and how-to’s that I’ve written both here and as contributions to other blogs.

Tools for Writing Better WordPress Code: Static Analysis

August 12, 2019 / Tom

In the most recent post of this series (which is admittedly some time ago), I talked at length about Composer and its lock file.

I recommend reading the previous two articles because Composer is eventually going to play a role in this material that this and future posts are going to share. But if you opt not to catch up on them (or are already familiar with Composer) then the gist of the previous posts are, respectively, as follows:

I don’t recommend checking the vendor directory into your repository. That can become a huge directory later, and it can undermine the whole purpose of Composer.
Composer

The goal is to make sure that every one is running the same version of the dependencies of the project – not older versions, not newer versions – but the same version.
The Composer Lock File

With that said, there are numerous dependencies or packages that we can install that help us to make sure that we’re writing the highest quality code possible.

Sure, some of these may be in the form of something like coding standards, but those are really more rules than they are elements of writing high quality code (though I don’t think they should be left out of the discussion – just left out at this time 🙃).

Back to the tools in question: What are some tools that help write high quality WordPress code? I’m going to share a few of my favorites and them I’m going to talk about how we can run them all against a code base.

First, let’s take a look at static analysis with PHPStan.

Sending Authorization Headers with WordPress

August 1, 2019 / Tom

Whenever we’re making remote requests with WordPress, we’re likely going to be using one of the following functions:

And, yes, sometimes we’ll be using cURL depending on the nature of the project, but that’s outside the content of this post.

For this article, I want to talk specifically about making remote requests and specifying headers against a third-party API.

Time Off 2019: Part 2 of 4 of Social Media Sabbaticals

July 31, 2019 / Tom

Earlier this year, I followed-suit with my usual routine of social media sabbaticals (which is just a fancier way of saying “time off of social media” 🎩).

If you’re new to reading this site, you can read my past entries here:

This is something I’ve been doing for a while now, and it’s something that I’ve found useful both for my personal and professional life.

And I don’t want to try to come up with some other reason for doing this so I’ll quote my previous post (because quoting yourself isn’t narcissistic or anything, is it?):

Every time I end up taking time off of social media in general, I never regret it. At the same time, I also find new things I want to do during that time.

But one of the things I like do during this post other than share that I am doing it (because I see this site as the primary place to keep up with me – not Twitter, not Instagram, not AIM, not ICQ), I like also to cover what I plan to do.

So here’s what I’m looking to do during August.

Adding Multiple Coding Standards with Composer

July 24, 2019 / Tom

It’s one thing to be using PHP CodeSniffer manually but if you’re using a utility such as GrumPHP to check your work before committing it to the repository, then you’re likely going to want to use the version that you’re installing with your project.

This assumes that:

You are installing PHP CodeSniffer local to your project,
You want to install a specific set of coding standards to run against your code.

Remember, this is also done in the context of wanting to run automated scripts during the commit process and in a local environment (versus a global setting) with Composer.

How To Remove Images with DOMDocument

July 9, 2019 / Tom

I’ve written about DOMDocument in a few other posts (1, 2, 3 to share a few) but I continue to find it useful in different ways.

Remember, DOMDocument is a class in PHP that allows us to manipulate the HTML document before rendering it in the browser.

From the manual:

Represents an entire HTML or XML document; serves as the root of the document tree.

Whenever I think of working with the saveHTML function, I think of needing to serialize the new information into a file or other output stream before sending it to the browser.

But we don’t have to do that. It can be done in memory.