Developers Standards

From Zen Cart(tm) Wiki

Contents 1 Zen Cart™ Coding Standards 2 Indentation 3 Control Structures 4 Function Calls 5 Function Definitions 6 Comments 7 Including Code 8 PHP Code Tags 9 Header Comment Blocks 10 Example URLs 11 Naming Conventions 11.1 Variable Names 11.2 Function Names 11.3 Class Names 12 Code Optimisations 13 SQL/SQL Layout 14 File Locations 15 Miscellaneous

Zen Cart™ Coding Standards

Currently the Zen Cart™ Team is using a mix of the pear/phpBB coding standards docs to provide the categories as below.

The coding standards posted here are what we strive for. They are not a definition of how code is currently written. So, if the code you get does not match posted standards, don't be surprised. It's a long and arduous battle to convert all core code.

Indentation

Currently, the standard is not to use hard tabs, and to use two spaces per indent.

The Zen Cart™ Team's thoughts are that regardless of whether you use tabs or spaces for indents, anything more than two spaces can quickly lead to indent hell. The argument then becomes whether indents should be hard tabs or soft spaces.

Soft spaces are preferred, unless someone can come up with a convincing argument otherwise (mainly because the tab /t can be interpreted differently across OS's and editors, whereas a space is always interpreted the same).

Control Structures

Function Calls

Function Definitions

Comments

Including Code

PHP Code Tags

Never use short open tags <? or asp tags <%; always use the full <?php ?> tags.

Header Comment Blocks

Example URLs

Naming Conventions

Variable Names

Function Names

Class Names

Code Optimisations

SQL/SQL Layout

File Locations

Miscellaneous