A plugin sold as object-oriented turned out to be one giant class full of static methods. That is not OOP, it is namespacing. Here is how to model real objects in WordPress, with state and behavior, using a Report class as the example.
A junior dev passed a post object where my function wanted an integer, and it failed silently with no error. That is the trap of overly defensive WordPress code, and when you control the environment, failing loudly beats bailing quietly.
A sharp junior dev was stuck on a bug that only showed up on staging, because he was lost without a GUI. The command line is the most direct way to see what a server is doing, and a couple of basic commands found the error in minutes.
Using custom post types as plain data storage scatters your business rules everywhere. Model that logic as PHP entity classes and map the entities onto CPTs instead, so the rules stay in one testable place.
A minor form change once broke logins across a client’s membership site. Unit tests passed anyway. Acceptance testing drives a real browser through the whole user flow, so this kind of break fails a test before customers ever see it.
A standalone Symfony CLI tool gets brittle once you wire every command’s dependencies by hand. This shows how to configure the dependency injection container so it autowires services and registers new console commands for you.
A client’s WooCommerce store kept crashing every Black Friday on a pricey managed server. Serverless hosting runs each request on its own short-lived instance, so a traffic surge scales instead of hitting a single box’s limits.
I remember getting a panicked call from a client a few years back. It was the week before Thanksgiving. Their site was locked up. A…
A client came to us with a plugin that was, to put it mildly, a total mess. It started simple enough: one little settings page….
I got a call from a new client in a panic. Their site was down. White screen of death. Turns out, their previous developer had…