PHP – General Chicken

Hiring low cost, off-shore WordPress / PHP outsourcers

How to get cheap software for WordPress using Test Driven Development.

Post an ad on a site like Upwork.com or Freelancer.com for a low cost PHP programmer, and you’ll experience something unlike anything else in business. You’ll receive applications faster than you can possibly read them. A vertitable gusher of low grade computer programmers. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.

$5/hr software developers, what could go wrong?
Obviously a lot. However, these programmers represent a massive untapped talent pool, and Test Driven Development is the technique you can use to leverage this talent. Using TDD, you can safely, effectively, and efficiently use low cost human talent on your projects.

Issue #1: Quality of work
Issue #2: Onboarding and retention
Issue #3: Security

Concept Massive talent pool
Concept Cost comparisons
Concept No employees
Concept 24 hours a day

Reveiw: Testing Your WP Plugins A Practical Guide

Plugins that remove or roll-back WordPress features

Tired of some new feature in WordPress?

As new features come out for WordPress, they almost always suck. Here are some plugins that roll back new “features”.

Classic Editor

Change Admin Email

WP Rollback

WP Disable Automatic Updates

Unfortunately, WP Disable Automatic Updates doesn’t seam to be working.

Disable Administration Email Verification Prompt

Behavior Driven Development from the Business Stakeholder’s Point of View

BDD is the best way to communicate business requirements from stakeholders to developers. General Chicken explains what BDD is from a business POV.

Running Codeception tests on multiple WordPress environments

Using the –env flag in Codeception. Running tests against multiple versions of WordPress.

Suppose you want to run your test suite against multiple environments? Perhaps with different browsers or with different versions of WordPress or PHP? Codeception makes this easy with the –env flag.

This is a plugin I made that rolls back a new feature added to WordPress 4.9. I want to run an acceptance test against the latest version of WordPress, and also against a legacy version of WordPress.

Setup multiple environments

I use an Ubuntu laptop with apache2. Your mileage will vary. When I develop a website, say site.com, I setup my laptop to redirect site.dev to a local directory on my laptop. There I keep a copy of the production site to work on.

Directions to setup multiple hosts from Rackspace.com

On my machine, I setup two distinct WordPress installs, one at http://localhost and the other at http://wp.dev. One running version 4.9 and the other running version 3.9.

In this example, I’ll be running an acceptance test against both versions of WordPress. I’ll need to setup the YML file like this:

I use this command:
bin/codecept run acceptance -vvv --html --env remotehost --env localhost

bin/codecept is the executable [might be wpcept or codecept]
acceptance is the suite
remotehost and localhost are the envs
-vvv very very verbose [one dash]
–html report to html [two dashes]

Codeception runs:

WordPress Plugin: Change Admin Email – running on over 40k servers!

General Chicken publishes a plugin in the wordpress.org repo: Change Admin Email Setting Without Outbound Email

As of WordPress 4.9, the administrator cannot change the site admin email without outgoing email setup on the server, and recipient email credentials. This plugin restores the admin’s ability to change this setting without sending a confirmation email.

Plugin in the wordpress.org repo: