What is Neutron?

[tdmalone]

Hallo. I came across this repo and I like the look of the standard... but I'm curious what Neutron is, where it's used, and how it is considered as opposed to WPCS. It seems like a more modern version of WPCS... and I'm intrigued, because we use WPCS internally and might be interested in replacing it with this.

Apologies for adding noise here; I can't seem to find anything relevant online about Neutron + WordPress :)

[Hywan]

Hello,

Apologies for adding noise here

Please, do not apology :-). It has not been clarified in the README.md, your question is perfectly expected and normal.

Neutron is the name of a team inside Automattic. We have more needs than WP CS, hence this set of rules in this repository. At one point in a far future, it might be merged in the WP CS, but that's not the goal.

[sirbrillig]

Most notably, WPCS sticks to PHP 5.2. This standard uses things like namespaces, typehints, and array shorthand designed for PHP 7+. Internally we use it on top of WPCS and variable-analysis with a bunch of disabled rules. I should probably put those disabled rules in here somewhere.

I've considered including the WPCS standard as a dependency of this standard, but I kind of like the idea that people can get specific sniffs from different packages; none of these are really WP-specific.

[tdmalone]

Thank you for the clarification! I would love to see those disabled rules; we’ve done much the same with WPCS. Our config is at https://github.com/ChromatixAU/phpcs-config-chromatix (but I must caveat that we are still learning how to use phpcs so there’s quite a few useful rules disabled until we figure out how to configure or rewrite them)

[sirbrillig]

@tdmalone it looks like this, currently:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ruleset name="MyStandard">
 <description>My library.</description>
 <rule ref="VariableAnalysis"/>
 <rule ref="NeutronStandard"/>
 <rule ref="WordPress"/>
 <rule ref="Squiz.Commenting">
     <severity>0</severity>
 </rule>
 <rule ref="WordPress.Files.FileName">
     <severity>0</severity>
 </rule>
 <rule ref="WordPress.NamingConventions.ValidFunctionName.MethodNameInvalid">
     <severity>0</severity>
 </rule>
 <rule ref="WordPress.Arrays.MultipleStatementAlignment.DoubleArrowNotAligned">
     <severity>0</severity>
 </rule>
 <rule ref="Generic.Formatting.MultipleStatementAlignment.NotSameWarning">
    <severity>0</severity>
 </rule>
 <rule ref="Generic.Commenting.DocComment.MissingShort">
    <severity>0</severity>
 </rule>
 <rule ref="WordPress.PHP.YodaConditions.NotYoda">
    <severity>0</severity>
 </rule>
</ruleset>

Cool to see more phpcs standards out there! If it helps, I wrote about my experiences creating sniffs on my blog. Possibly of use to your standard from the post: adding a directory above your Sniffs directory so you can have a standard name which is not the name of your package (eg: <rule ref="Chromatix"/>), and the type field of your composer.json being set to phpcodesniffer-standard so that it can be used without having to all the phpcs --config-set installed_paths stuff.

[tdmalone]

@sirbrillig Thank you! Really appreciate your guidance. I have adding your blog post to my reading list. 👍