{"id":896,"date":"2008-08-15T14:25:05","date_gmt":"2008-08-15T12:25:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/?page_id=896"},"modified":"2008-08-15T17:10:20","modified_gmt":"2008-08-15T15:10:20","slug":"make-clean-and-readable-sources-why-and-how","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/articles\/make-clean-and-readable-sources-why-and-how\/","title":{"rendered":"Make Clean and Readable Sources — Why and How"},"content":{"rendered":"

In August 2008 I made a quick review of 50 plugins (part 1<\/a>, part 2<\/a>) and was really surprised by the number of coders who ship plugins with barely readable code. Working, even clever, but ugly code.<\/p>\n

Making clean sources is not a useless mania of a compulsive obsessive geek, it's truly a requisite for maintainable code. It won't make your code good — just better.<\/p>\n

For less experienced coders here are a few rules of thumb I try to follow. That's just my word and my coding habits, nothing is to be considered as the<\/em> definitive best practice, but I hope this will make anyway a good pointer for novices.<\/p>\n

Good Plugin Habits: Make clean and readable sources<\/h2>\n

As a WordPress plugins<\/a> coder, mostly everything I know, I've learnt it by reading sources: find about a plugin that does something, wonder how I would do that or even how such a thing is possible, then read the plugin source to compare their solution and mine, or even just learn about a new trick, a new API or a function I didn't know about. I barely read instructions or readmes, but I always read the sources.<\/p>\n

And as a WordPress plugins<\/a> releaser, I maintain a number of scripts. I wrote some of them four years ago, and anyway most of the time when I haven't worked on a plugin for more than a couple of months, I totally forget how I coded it. Maintaining plugins means updating them once in a while: either someone finds a bug, or the WordPress code and APIs evolve in a way that breaks the plugin, so I have to rewrite parts of it. Basically, this means rediscovering my own plugin: read the sources, wonder how I did this and why I did that. Needless to say, this is much less cumbersome if the source is clean.<\/p>\n

To me, making clean sources is twofold: help others reading my code, but primarily help the future-me maintaining outdated stuff. If someone finds your source hardly readable, you will too.<\/p>\n