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.
Ongoing development will be done in the `development` with merges done into `master` once considered stable. Development of unit tests is needed, per [issue 21](https://github.com/x-team/WordPress-Coding-Standards/issues/21).
Normally when working with PEAR, the `pear install` command is used, but GitHub automatically names the files in a way that will confuse the `pear install`, 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.
A tiny subset of the options available to codesniffer have been used in this example, and there's much more that can be done in a `ruleset.xml` file. Check the [phpcs documentation](http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.php.php-codesniffer.php) to see a [fully annotated example to build upon](http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.php.php-codesniffer.coding-standard-tutorial.php).
Check your `PATH` if it includes new binaries added into the pear directories. You may have to add `:/usr/local/php/bin` before you can 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 to find where the `phpcs` binary was added, and where the PEAR library is by default.
