For the past few years, one of the areas of WordPress that has interested me the most is the area of the WordPress Coding Standards. Specifically, it’s one area in which I’ve tried to contribute and it’s one area in which I’ve talked about at my local WordCamp.

To say that I think they are a little important would be an understatement, so given the opportunity to talk about them – evangelize them, even – I will.

The short of it is this:

I’ve had a number of people help me to begin writing better WordPress-style code over the years, and I’ve seen a direct result of the impact that it can have when maintaining projects that are built with teams or even just myself.

Furthermore, there’s a lot of code that I’ve audited, reviewed, or seen suggested that does not follow the WordPress Coding Standards and this helps to perpetuate a problem that has a clear solution on how to fix.

To that end, I’m excited to share that I’ll be participating in an upcoming event at WP Sessions all about the WordPress Coding Standards.

WordPress Coding Standards Matter

For those who aren’t familiar, WP Sessions is a service provided by Brian Richards aiming to provide educational resources and training to those looking to improve their WordPress development skills. Currently, Brian is doing a set of sessions each of which are about $9 to attend and that include some really interesting and useful talks.

WordPress Coding Standards

Straight from the event page:

Learn how to remove the “fingerprints” from your code and implement the sane coding standards adopted by WordPress. Tom McFarlin will walk us through why code standards are good for the planet and how you can best start following them in your own code.

Next Friday at 2pm EST (or UTC-4), I’ll be talking about exactly this. Note that I don’t receive any commission or anything for promoting this event – I just want to help get the word out for those who are interested in attending.

Throughout our time together, I’ll be talking about some of the following points:

  • Why coding standards are important especially within the context of an open source environment
  • Why we, as developers, should be using them in our projects (and how they help our teammates as well as us)
  • What happens when you don’t use them and how this can negatively impact a project as it begins to enter future phases of development
  • How coding standards contribute to the maintainability of software over time and how this can impact the bottom line of a business

I’m really looking forward to participating in this event, I’m looking forward to seeing those of you who are interested in attending, you know, in attendance, and I’m also looking forward to our time of questions, comments, and conversation after the event is held.

Of course, if you have anything that you’d like to see specifically covered or answered during the talk, feel free to leave them in the comments below and I’ll do what I can to answer them now or during the presentation itself.

Anyway, mark your calendars for next Friday at 2pm, UTC-4 for the presentation. And thanks to Brian for the opportunity to participate in this.