PHP Coding Standards for the Klein College of Media and Communication

Strict enough for idealists, relaxed enough for realists.

Goals and Non-Goals

• Clear separation of tooling domains to prevent conflicts
• Prefer PHP Framework Interop Group (PHP-FIG) standards where feasible
• Encourage WordPress-specific best practices while guarding against reactionary
  norms
• No support for unsupported PHP versions (obviously, right?!)
• Guard against footguns → minimize wake-up calls

Style: PHP-CS-Fixer (.php-cs-fixer.dist.php)

Generally follows the Symfony setlist for PHP-CS-Fixer. The Symfony standards are currently based on PER-2.0.

Currently handled per project by copy-paste.

Linting: PHP_CodeSniffer (.phpcs.xml.dist)

Primarily based on the WordPress-VIP-Go ruleset. While we do not use WordPress VIP hosting, this standard encourages best-practices while allowing for stylistic flexibility. This is achieved by applying a curated set of rules from the core WordPress Coding Standards in addition to a set of custom sniffs. Unfortunately (but understandably), many of the messages make reference to WordPress VIP as a platform, as the standard assumes that the code will target that hosting platform.

We also include many hand-picked additions from the SlevomatCodingStandard and some a few adapted from the PSR12NeutronRuleset [link].

In previous versions, we extended the Doctrine coding standard, but it was too opinionated and resulted in an endless back-and-forth disagreement between php-cs-fixer and phpcbf. Despite our efforts to counteract that behavior, the result of applying fixes with similar goals often differed slightly.

Type-safety: PHPStan (.phpstan.neon.dist)

Each project must pass Level 0 checks at minimum. Upon initial introduction of PHPStan to a project, start with Level 0, then gradually increase. As far as we can tell, Level 8 is the highest achievable level in a WordPress context. Level 9 essentially prohibits the usage of mixed types.

Miscellaneous

We also include a biome.json file here for project-internal usage. The biome.json here can serve as a good starting point for other projects, but currently this package is orientated towards PHP coverage only.

The just (//.justfile, //.config/just), pre-commit (//nix/git-hooks.nix), and treefmt (//nix/treefmt.nix) configurations are also decent starting points, but this project does not aim to provide a general-purpose template for those tools.

This project does not commit a composer.lock in order to prevent downstream dependency hell.