WordPress Plugin Starter

A minimal file and minimal configuration WordPress plugin focused on a productive development workflow.

The main advantages (and reasons) for using this starter are:

• Uses wp-scripts for linting and building JavaScript, Sass and Markdown.
• Uses strauss for composer package inclusion and auto-loading Enforces WordPress coding standards
• Uses husky, lint-staged and commitlint to prevent bad commits in your repo
• You can use .jsx (and React for that matter) for JavaScript development
• Minimal dependencies on your system, just composer and npm and optionally lando and/or docker
• If you use Visual Studio Code you'll be prompted to install recommended extensions

Requirements & Tools

There are only 2 dependencies that most WordPress developers should already have:

• composer
• npm (If you want to compile Js and Sass)

The recommended editor is Visual Studio Code.

Note: You'll get prompted to auto-install the recommended extensions on new projects.

Setup

You can use degit to create a new project from scratch:

cd /path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins
npx degit marioy47/wordpress-plugin-starter my-new-plugin
cd my-new-plugin
code package.json # (recommended) Change the name of the plugin
npm install
lando start # or `docker-compose up -d`
npm start

Note: The postinstall script in package.json will do the following:

• Install composer packages for you
• Setup husky for linting commits
• Execute the bin/rename-plugin.js script

Coding Standards

This plugin is configured to be rigorous when checking the code standards. That's why is recommended that you read https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/coding-standards/ beforehand.

Npm and Composer commands

There are multiple helper scripts in package.json and composer but the more important ones are:

• npm run build To build the JS and Scss files to the final format
• npm start To start a "watch" command that will compile any changed JS and SCSS files

Common issues

Issues with PHPCS and PHPCBF

If you are using a version of PHP newer than 8.1 you might get errors in the form:

FILE: /Users/mario/Projects/wordpress-plugin-starter/php/class-my-test-class.php
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUND 1 ERROR AFFECTING 1 LINE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | ERROR | An error occurred during processing; checking has been aborted. The error message was: trim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type
   |       | string is deprecated in
   |       | /Users/mario/Projects/wordpress-plugin-starter/vendor/wp-coding-standards/wpcs/WordPress/Sniffs/NamingConventions/PrefixAllGlobalsSniff.php on
   |       | line 280 (Internal.Exception)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The solution would be to downgrade PHP to 8.0 (recommended) or 7.4. This is how to do it using brew

brew tap shivammathur/php
brew install shivammathur/php/[email protected]
brew link --overwrite --force shivammathur/php/[email protected]
php --version # Should be 8.0.X