Is Unit Test Essential For Your WordPress Plugin? Used by approximately 75 million websites, WordPress has become the most popular PHP based opensource content management system (CMS). If you are also looking for a versatile website development, then hire WordPress developer from a leading web development company and it will do the complete work for you. As of April 2018, “WordPress is used by 30.6% of the top 10 million websites.” This robust web platform holds the capacity to get extended in order to serve multipurpose like setting up a blog website, a personalized website or an eCommerce store. It is free to install and comes with thousands of plugins & templates that allow a flexible user interface. Every plugin is important in its own way and benefits you in two flavors i.e. either you extend the basic functionality of your WordPress website or extend the themes/plugins. Irrespective of its use, there is always a need to do complete unit test for every WordPress plugin that you code. There are a variety of quality tests available and of all, a unit test is the most popular among the developers. Let’s have a look on the core essence of a unit test and how it helps you to enjoy a seamless integration of plugin in your WordPress powered website. Why do you need to perform Unit Test? Whenever you code a WordPress plugin it is quite essential to test it before implementing it to your website. The reason behind this need includes the inter-linkage of this new feature with the existing website’s performance i.e. it may affect the speed of your website, can hamper other installed plugins processes etc. In general, a unit test is referred to a software testing method in which you set particular conditions and the newly added plugin is tested to determine whether it is returning the expected results or not? Unit test occurs as an initial stage of any software testing and it mainly focuses on the complete functionality of every unit or component of the new feature set to be added. Whenever we code a plugin it always consists of various functions, procedures, and classes which are referred to a unit. And, a unit testing, as its name suggests, confine every unit and validate its accuracy to make sure it doesn’t hold any defect or bug. The major purpose of this testing is to find the discrepancies of your plugin at an earlier stage. It is always a good practice to ensure the existing code lines aren’t broken. Additionally, a unit test always helps you to eliminate the future & existing bugs; it makes refactoring of the codes very easy; it provides a sorted documentation of your code i.e. in the future, if you wish to come across your written code it will be easy for you to go through it. A few other benefits include the following: • • • • •
A unit test should always be a set of smaller and less complicated functions or modules. Unit testing helps to improve code design, especially with test-driven development. Less cost of locating and fixing bugs in Unit Testing. Simplified Integration Offers a source of Integration
Whenever you take a risk to perform logic without testing you may end up in a dilemma. And, sticking with PHPUnit turns out to be of great use as it is an official framework of choice for WordPress. Prior conducting a unit test, you need these essentials: •
PHPUnit, used to test the PHP code;
Install PHPUnit with the following command: composer global require phpunit/phpunit:5.* •
WP-CLI, a WordPress Command Line interface that allows integration of your written test with the WordPress installs;
Install WP-CLI Run the following commands: curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar chmod +x wp-cli.phar sudo mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp •
An access to MySQL database and of course, a WordPress setup.
BOTTOMLINE A perfect unit test always needs well-defined modules, good design, and carries simple well-understood interfaces.