A presentation at WordCamp Nordic in in Helsinki, Finland by Andrey Savchenko
Lessons from WordPress core on how to (not) write code
2 You can’t afford WordPress code
3 WordPress core development 1. technical debt → popularity 2. popularity → volunteers 3. volunteers → technical debt
4 WordPress in StackOverflow survey — 6th Most Dreaded Platform (2018) — 3rd Most Dreaded Platform (2017) — 2nd Most Dreaded Technology (2016) — 3rd Most Dreaded Technology (2015)
5 Not “is it good?” but “what is good?”
7 Best APIs 1. Custom Post Types (74% positive) 2. Plugin (hooks) (75%) 3. Custom Taxonomies (70%) 4. Queue (CSS and JS) (70%) 5. Options and Transients (57%)
8 Best APIs — commonalities — laconic — procedural — flexible — public
9 Worst APIs 1. Rewrite (59% negative) 2. XML–RPC (61%) 3. List Tables (53%) 4. Editor (48%) 5. Filesystem (47%)
10 Worst APIs — commonalities — verbose — persistent — clunky — semi–private
11 WordPress is a story not a blueprint
12 Be WordPress–good, not WordPress–bad — make great APIs — hold on to your wins — part with your failures — love users and developers — write reliable flexible code
13 Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko — Rarst.net — WordPress contractor — Date/Time core component maintainer Rarst.net/slides/core-lessons
WordPress commitment to backwards compatibility spawned an extensive code base with rich functionality. Much of it has now seen many years of very active use by developers.
The history of it is fascinating to study and learn from. It teaches us principles of code that see sustained and productive use. As well as challenges of code that fell short and became an endless challenge.
This talk will walk through the results of the poll on developer experience with the core code. And distill them into practical lessons on code design for success.
The audience will get an overview of the best (and worst) parts of code in WordPress core. Followed by a practical summary of their traits and challenges.
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
The blog post about the developer experience survey and results.
Here’s what was said about this presentation on social media.
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