Everyone agrees that extensive testing of WordPress plugins is necessary. The problem is that the tests we run as developers don’t take into consideration certain edge cases and rely on our experience to determine what needs to be tested. Testing is also time-consuming and quite frankly not very fun. Automated testing is recommended to ensure …Continue reading
Tools
WP-CLI Cheatsheet for site setup
For those who are comfortable with WP-CLI but haven’t yet memorised all the commands here are some of the more common ones I use when developing client sites. The object here is to save time and to avoid do repetitive (and unexciting) tasks in wp-admin. If you aren’t comfortable with WP-CLI and would like to …Continue reading
Using the Php Storm Code Sniffer for WordPress
Although I’ve been using Php Storm for a while now I am only just discovering some of the benefits of the IDE. One of these is to be able to apply coding standards to projects where they are lacking. Although there is documentation on the Php Storm site, it doesn’t directly apply to WordPress and …Continue reading
Moving from MAMP to Vagrant for WordPress
Why Vagrant? Over the years I have been a faithful user of MAMP, WAMP, and even XXAMP. As a freelancer, I don’t have much occasion to share my development environment and most of my clients have similar environments- shared servers in the low to mid range using a LAMP stack. I almost always have a …Continue reading
Building Custom Forms in WordPress
Whether sent via email or stored in a database, for login, or a subscription to a newsletter, a form is an essential part of every website. For anyone just learning HTML, forms are where it starts to get tricky and PHP without forms wouldn’t be much of a language. The trouble with forms isn’t that …Continue reading
Requiring Plugins for WordPress Custom Themes
One of the chief difficulties in separating functionality and style is that there is no longer a nice “package” to present to a client. When handing off the custom theme there needs to be some detailed explanation about required plugins and installation, and setup of these plugins is a time consuming and onerous task. With …Continue reading
Php Storm + AZERTY = :) –Updated
Update: I am very pleased to announce that as PHP Storm 9 (or maybe even a later build of PHP Storm 8) this problem has been fixed. You can now do keyboard mapping to your heart’s content and the default mappings work as expected on AZERTY 🙂 I was very excited to use PhpStorm by …Continue reading
Up and running with WP-CLI
This isn’t a tutorial about installing WP-CLI but if you want one I recommend this one. Let’s compare two ways of downloading WordPress and creating the database. Without WP-CLI This is the fastest way I’ve managed to install WordPress on my local server before WP-CLI: 1. Create the database. mysql -u [username] -p[password] -e “create …Continue reading