The Evolution of WordPress Software Development
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When you start to use WordPress as an application platform, one thing is very soon clear: WordPress defines very little base structure for your application code, where to put and how to write tests, how application is loaded, or for example how dependencies should be managed. Because of this, applications or just complex sites built on top of WordPress tend to get really messy. There are application frameworks built on top of WordPress, but none of them seem to have wide enough use for to build any serious applications on top of. Until any of those gets wide-spread adoption, combining existing, non-WordPress specific PHP technologies as a custom solution probably is a more future-proof solution. We will be looking into one possible stack of technologies.
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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