This project is a collection of PHP_CodeSniffer rules (sniffs) to validate code developed for WordPress.
This is a fork of the WordPressCoding Standards project from [Urban Giraffe](http://urbangiraffe.com/articles/wordpress-codesniffer-standard/) published in 2009, at which time Matt Mullenweg gave it a [shoutout](http://ma.tt/2009/04/wordpress-codesniffer/). A couple years later, the project was picked up by [Chris Adams](http://chrisadams.me.uk/) who published it to a [repo](https://github.com/mrchrisadams/WordPress-Coding-Standards) on GitHub in May 2011. Initially Chris added a missing `ruleset.xml` file which prevented the rules from being detected by phpcs. Since that time there have been around a dozen [contributions](https://github.com/mrchrisadams/WordPress-Coding-Standards/commits/master) to improve the project. It is surprising that there has not been more community involvement in developing these sniffs, as it is a very useful tool to ensure code quality and adherence to coding conventions, especially the official [WordPress Coding Standards](http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Coding_Standards) which are currently only partially accounted for by the sniffs. [X-Team](http://x-team.com/) has forked the project and is dedicating resources to further develop it and make it even more useful to the WordPress community at large.
The sniffs were developed for phpcs 1.3; work will be done to ensure compatibility with the latest version, which is 1.4.
Normally when working with PEAR, we'd use the pear install command, but github automatically names the files, in a way that think will confuse the pear install command, so we're falling back to git instead.
You can use this to sniff individual files, or use different flags to recursively scan all the directories in a project. This command will show you each file it's scanning, and how many errors it's finding:
Instead, try installing the WordPress standard, then invoking it from a project specific codesniffer ruleset instead, like in the supplied example file.
I've used a tiny subset of the options available to codesniffer in this example, and there's much more you can do here in a `ruleset.xml` file. Check the documentation site to see a [fully annotated example to build upon][] (which is where I started initially).
Check your PATH if it includes new binaries added into the pear directories. I had to add `:/usr/local/php/bin` before I could call `phpcs` on the command line.
Remember that you can see where pear is looking for stuff, and putting things, by calling `pear config-show`. This is how I found out where the Codesniffer binary was added, and where the pear library is by default.
