The Evolution of WordPress Software Development

The Evolution of WordPress Software Development

Aki Björklund @akibjorklund

How do you organize your custom code?

Why?

I bet it is not pretty

WordPress offers no file/folder structure

WordPress offers no autoloading

WordPress offers no unit test framework

WordPress offers no dependency management

WordPress offers no [insert a “professional” software

development tool here]

Probably it shouldn’t either

There aren’t any plugins you can install to get those

There are plugin frameworks and some site frameworks

They are not widespread

…thus not suitable as basis of significant applications

We could roll our own… or not

What can we use then?

Create a solution out of existing widespread technologies

Solution like that is on a stable foundation

I’ll introduce to you our stack

Yours could be different

Bedrock gives us a project structure, but not for your own code

Composer gives us dependency management

Composer PHP autoloader will load files when they are needed

Symfony’s DependencyInjection component lets us write loosely

coupled code

PHPUnit and WP_Mock enable unit testing

WPlinth is our collection of base classes

About code organization

Site specific code lives in the mu-plugins folder

mu-plugins/app-loader.php

Example folder structure of the

application

/Connection /PostType /QueryFilter /Service /Taxonomy /Test Application.php

Classes inherit WPlinth base classes

Invest in some time to organize your code

No need to use all the tools mentioned here for all projects

Document your solution online

Let’s start building standards

Write code that you would gladly inherit from someone else

10 years from now

@akibjorklund

akibjorklund.com/2015/wceu for slides and more info