The Delicious Brains site has posted a new tutorial, the third part in their "Automating Local WordPress Setup" series, covering the automation of "the rest" of the setup steps. This includes virtual host setup, plugin installation and cleanup.

In my last post in the Automating Local WordPress Setup series, I created a WP-CLI package for quickly installing and uninstalling WordPress. I’ve been using this package for a while now, and have been itching to make it more useful for a typical development workflow.

[...] I also still catch myself doing things that I know should be automated. Things like deleting unnecessary data, removing the default themes/plugins, and installing new plugins, are things that can be automated to make development easier. In this post we’re going to take a look at some ways to make all that possible.

The article is then broken down into three sections with scripts/code that can help with these automations:

• Working with Virtual Hosts (and MAMP)
• Cleaning Up the Install (deleting extra themes, plugins, etc)
• Installing Frequently Used Plugins (your custom list based on a "plugin list" file

The post finishes out with a screencast showing this plugin installation that makes it easier to come up with easy to reproduce, simple to spin up WordPress environments.

In a post to his site Frank de Jonge looks at a few different topics around the idea of "cleaning up after yourself" when it comes to the use of finally, file streams and deferred execution.

Cleaning up after yourself can be a tedious task. For example, closing file handlers after using them needs to be done. A programmer's life isn't all about the happy path. When things go pear-shaped you might end up duplicating cleanup code throughout your code. This is horrible, let's explore an alternative.

He starts by looking at the use of resources for file handling instead of something like file_get_contents. Along with this, however, comes "less happy" things to do around cleanup of the resource in case of error or when complete. He suggests that it can be better handled and, after comparing a PHP function version to a Go function doing the same, refactors to make use of finally to close the resource in one place (and it is always called exception on exception). He refactors it even more by splitting it out into a "cleanup" function that can be reused in other places where resources are accessed.

If you're a Codeception user, you'll find Matthew Turland's latest post interesting. In it he shares a way to customize database cleanup between the tests. Codeception handles it a bit differently that how PHPUnit's Db module does.

Recently, I was looking into ways to speed up the runtime of the test suite at Blopboard. We use the Codeception framework to write functional tests for our REST API, part of which entails putting the database into a known state using Codeception’s Db module. The behavior of this module is similar to that of the PHPUnit Database extension with one exception: where PHPUnit only truncates tables and leaves their schemas intact, Codeception removes the database structure and expects the SQL dump it uses to recreate it between tests. I must admit to not understanding this design decision of Codeception, nor attempts to clarify it.

He admits that his solution is "a bit hacky" but it does work to truncate the table rather than drop the entire schema and wait for a rebuild. His "DbHelper" class is used in place of the Db module. He traced through the execution path of the Db module and found a "hook" where he could override the "cleanup" method to prevent the schema drop and replace it with a truncate. He also includes code for a suggested addition to Codception that would handle the same thing in a more integrated way.

On the Zumba Engineering blog today Chris Taylor has a new post about mocking in PHPUnit, specifically how to handle those pesky Singleton methods lurking around your codebase.

In many of our projects, utilities and vendor classes are implemented with a singleton pattern. [...] In this post, we’ll cover a nice way to inject a PHPUnit mock object for use in testing methods that utilize singleton classes.

He starts by introducing mocking and how to use mock classes in PHPUnit with a simple "sayHello" example. Adding on another layer, he creates a "SomeclassMock" class, defining its own "expects" and "cleanup" methods. This class forces the Singleton method to act more like a regular non-static method and "resets" it after each use.

Richard Thomas has a suggestion for the Zend Framework development group - clean out the attic before you hit the 2.0 mark.

A big focus of 2.0 it seems is going to be performance and cleaning up the structure to make use of php 5.3 features which is great, I have been preaching the need for ZF to start taking performance as a real concern for a while now. On the other hand they have gotten to a certain point that they need to reflect on what they already have and not let the spiderwebs grow to large.

Richard points out that the Zend Framework, which has a focus on being a "business-class framework" and having the best to offer, has quite a few parts of it that are older and aren't well maintained. This sort of thing could cause some big problems down the line and could even cause some doubt over the developer's choice of frameworks.

According to this post on the SDA Asia site today, Andi Gutmans is quoted as saying that Yahoo is doing their share in helping PHP6 come along that much faster.

Yahoo is Helping Zend with PHP 6, says Andi Gutmans co-founder and vice president of technology at Israeli-based company Zend Technologies, in an interview with Stephen Shankland of c|net news. PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

They mention what PHP6 will be and include a link to the (oldish) meeting notes concerning it. Be sure to check out the comments for some interesting questions...

According to this post on the SDA Asia site today, Andi Gutmans is quoted as saying that Yahoo is doing their share in helping PHP6 come along that much faster.

Yahoo is Helping Zend with PHP 6, says Andi Gutmans co-founder and vice president of technology at Israeli-based company Zend Technologies, in an interview with Stephen Shankland of c|net news. PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

They mention what PHP6 will be and include a link to the (oldish) meeting notes concerning it. Be sure to check out the comments for some interesting questions...