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.
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.
