WordPress Coding Standards 1.0.0 Released

After nine years since the project began, version 1.0.0 of the WordPress Coding Standards is available for download. The WordPress Coding Standards is a collection of PHP_CodeSniffer rules or sniffs to validate code developed for WordPress. It ensures code quality and adherence to coding conventions, including the official WordPress Coding Standards.

In addition to being a big milestone, 1.0.0 contains breaking changes. “A number of sniffs have been moved between categories and the old sniff names have been deprecated,” Juliette Reinders Folmer, a significant contributor to the project, said.

“If you selectively include any of these sniffs in your custom ruleset or set custom property values for these sniffs, your custom ruleset will need to be updated.”

The WordPress-VIP ruleset has been deprecated as well. “This ruleset has not been valid for some time, as we have our own VIP coding standards, available for public use,” David Artiss, a member of the WordPress.com VIP support team, said.

“If you are a VIP client and you are not using the alternative rulesets, then we would strongly recommend switching to these. If you used the WordPress-VIP ruleset for any other reason, you should use WordPress-Extra or WordPress instead.”

Those who use the WordPress Coding Standards Sniffs are strongly encouraged to read the changelog before updating. WordPress Coding Standards is a free, open source project, that’s available on GitHub where contributions are welcomed.