WordPress Coding Standards

So you’re beginning to learn your way around building products and/or services for WordPress. Perhaps you’ve read some tutorials, been through the Codex, built a couple of themes or plugins, and now you’re ready to begin working on a project for a client or with a team.

There are a lot of variables to take into consideration all of which range from project management to design from specification to development. Though each of those is important in its own regard, there’s one thing that you can expect to be constant throughout your projects and that’s writing code.

For many, when you first begin working in software development – or any form of writing code – it’s often that many of us think that if we can just get the project working, then we’ve done our part.

But the longer you work in the field, the more people with which you work, and the larger the project, the more you learn that it’s *not* enough just to get it working. Instead, there’s a level of quality that must be built into the code that makes the project work.

Yes, it helps to know how to plan the architecture of the project and yes, it helps to have some experience with design – be it object-oriented or not – but it also helps to know the coding standards of the language and platform of which you’re working.

And when it comes to WordPress, there are several languages with which you have to be familiar. At the very least, you’re looking at PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (and this doesn’t include anything like Sass or jQuery).

WordPress, like many other languages, platforms, and frameworks, has its own set of coding standards and if you’re going to be a professional WordPress developer, then it helps to under them and to apply them in your work.

Topics Covered

In this session, we’re going to take a look at exactly why that’s the case. Specifically, we’re going to discuss…

1. Why coding standards are important
2. Why we, as developers, should be using them throughout our projects
3. The dangers of not using coding standards
4. How coding standards contribute to the maintainability of our software

We’ll also talk about where we can find WordPress resources, how this can affect the bottom line of any software-based business, how they contribute to better debugging, and code modification, and ideally how they can make our jobs (which are already stressful enough), a little bit easier.