Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Tag: PHP (Page 4 of 12)

Installing, Configuring, and Setting Up Xdebug in Visual Studio Code

TL;DR: This is everything that needs to be done to install Xdebug with a Homebrew-based environment and to work with the software within Visual Studio Code.


Though I’ve recently become a fan of using Ray (1, 2) for much of my lightweight debugging, this doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s important to have Xdebug installed and configured in Visual Studio Code.

If you follow the steps I’ve outlined starting in the previous post, it’s relatively easy though it still requires a little bit of manual work to get started.

This is how you can set up Xdebug with a Homebrew-based configuration and Visual Studio Code.

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Installing PHP 7.4 and PHP Monitor for WordPress Development

TL;DR: How to uninstall PHP 8.1, install PHP 7.4, why you should do so, and one extra utility to helps manage PHP packages and modules.


When I wrote about how to fix WordPress, PHP, MariaDB, and Homebrew, I didn’t cover some of the other larger issues that I experienced when working backwards into the solution.

I need to give Ihor a hat tip here because he and I spoke about this more on Twitter regarding the relationship between WordPress, PHP 7.4, 8.0, and 8.1.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t clarify the following:

  1. I was running PHP 8.1.
  2. WordPress is not compatible with PHP 8.1
  3. WordPress is [allegedly] compatible with PHP 8.0 but I’ve not tested it or my tools against this version because I wanted to have full compatibility.
  4. I downgraded my system to PHP 7.4.27 until I get my entire set up configured as I like. Then I’ll start upgrading components.

So if you’ve followed the aforementioned post, here’s a more complete set of things I’ve set up to make sure everything is working well together – including things I’m working on writing about 🙂.

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Using a Registry, Subscribers, and Services in WordPress

TL;DR: I find the using a registry, subscribers, and services very useful when building backend-centric plugins and utilities for WordPress. This post walks through how to do it.


After working in with design patterns, object-oriented programming, and WordPress for years, common ways of solving problems are bound to arise.

This is how we got object-oriented design patterns to begin with, so maybe this is a WordPress-centric variation of that.

Though I’ve written about things such as registries in previous articles (and ones that are not that old even), it’s never a bad idea to revisit the same topic especially when there’s something to continue to add to the previous take.

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How To Downgrade Composer, PHP, and NPM

TL;DR: If you’re working on a variety of projects each of which requires different versions of PHP, Composer, and/or NPM you may need to change the version of all or any permutation of any of these utilities.

This article outlines what steps need to be taken to downgrade Composer, PHP, or NPM when working on any given project.

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Writing PHP Command-Line Applications: Command-Line Arguments

TL;DR: $argv is an array of arguments passed to the script with the first index being the name of the script itself. And $argc is the number of arguments passed to the the script (which will always at least be 1).


Arguably, pun intended, one of the key pieces of command-line application is making sure that they are interactive through command-line arguments. In PHP, there are two variables to understand:

  • $argc is the number of arguments passed to script. Note the script’s filename is always passed as an argument to the script, therefore the minimum value of $argc is 1.
  • $argv is an array of arguments passed to script. Note the first argument $argv[0] is always the name that was used to run the script.
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