Development Code Style

[burghard]

I saw the pull request to merge commits for "Allow databasejoin as primary key" from Sophist last night. One of the commit contains the changes to the functionality and on commit contains formatting changes.

Is there a code style published for the Fabrik project?

 

[Sophist]

Not that I know of. I suspect that Hugh is the only person who could write one, and that he is too busy to have the time.

I can derive a couple of style guidelines:

• "if" blocks are surrounded by blank lines
• methods and class variables are preceded by a comment block

There are probably other non-style coding guidelines that we could come up with:

• All strings output to users should be in a language file

 

[burghard]

There is good Joomla Coding Standard. Does it fit in the needs of this project?

 

[Sophist]

Having now read some of the Joomla Coding Guidelines, it seems that Fabrik probably makes a reasonable attempt at meeting them.

Looking at Github Joomla-cms, it looks like they have the following tools integrated into their PR process:

• Appveyor (automated build?)
• Drone (automated build?)
• Travis-ci (automated testing)

I was hoping to find a code quality tool in that list so that we could easily crib the configuration of the Joomla coding standards - but unfortunately not.

 

[Sophist]

One area for improvement is XML styles - where we have a mixed conformance with https://developer.joomla.org/coding-standards/xml.html.

I'll add this to the Wiki Coding ToDo list.

 

[Sophist]

A bit more reading... and I find https://developer.joomla.org/coding-standards/analysis.html and a bit more research suggests that PHP CodeSniffer can be integrated with Github using Code Climate.

We would need to get Hugh's agreement to integrate this into the Github repo, but if he agrees that could be another small project for a community member - and would then identify ongoing opportunities for code quality improvement.