Hi 👋, I'm Juanjo, a PHP developer that builds amazing products for WordPress and WooCommerce.
Tests are an important part of the workflow of every project. They help us to verify everything is working as expected after applying changes to our code and give us the trust to publish them safely.
They also allow us to improve our productivity and deliverability by automating the testing task and setting us free to focus on adding new features.
Giving support and assistance to customers is an essential part of every business.
This service can be materialized in different ways: A pre-sale question to answer the customer’s doubts, helping with the setup and usage of the products, or just solving the incidences it can happen with the shipping or their bad working.
People usually think the work of a software developer is to write code in one or more programming languages to create computer programs, build a website, or an application, and it’s valid to a certain extent, but what’s the real work of a developer?
Previously on “Stop using arrays for everything“, I exposed that an array wasn’t always the best way to accomplish a task and I gave an example in which an object was a better solution for that case.
Today, I’d like to illustrate how powerful the OOP can be and the benefits of using objects. To do so, I’ll use as an example one of the most popular WordPress plugins and the biggest e-commerce platform at this moment. I’m talking about WooCommerce and how this one handles the data of its different kinds of objects like products, orders, coupons, etc.
Arrays are a very important element in PHP. We can use them as functions’ arguments, to store and sort a collection of data, etc. They are always there for making our lives easier, but sometimes we tend to use arrays more than we should be.
The codebase of a project is in continuous evolution. We add new features, fix issues, and at some point in the development, we found that some code we wrote in the past is no longer necessary. Under this situation, we may have the temptation of removing this piece of code, but is it right?
In a previous post, we learned how to use the tool PHP_CodeSniffer to accomplish with the WordPress and WooCommerce standards and make our code more readable, robust, and secure.
But executing a command in our terminal every time we want to check if the code we have written is correct can be quite tedious. Fortunately, we can integrate this tool with our favorite IDE and get assistance for the coding standards while we write our code.
Every programming language, framework, or library has (or should have) its own coding standards. The benefits of using a standard are well known in our industry.
So, here I am, writing my first post in my new blog. Eight years after I started working with WordPress, I decide to use it for the same purpose it was created at the beginning.
