PHP Meeting Recap – July 30th

This recap is a summary of our previous PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher meeting. It highlights the ideas and decisions which came up during that meeting, both as a means of documenting and to provide a quick overview for those who were unable to attend.

You can find this meeting’s chat log here.

Chat Summary

• It was discussed which types of errors and exceptions to handle in scope of the sandbox mode (see #44458).
• @schlessera presented a document in which he had prepared comprehensive resources and his suggestions for what to handle.
• The approach was mostly agreed on, with the addition that the E_USER_ERROR type should also be covered, since many plugins make use of it, some of which are among the most popular ones.
• The following PHP errors should be treated:
  • E_PARSE
  • E_ERROR
  • E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR
  • E_USER_ERROR
• Regarding exceptions, only the base Exception and the PHP7 Error exception classes need to be treated, basically as a catch-all.
• It is not necessary to wrap the try-catch statement catching Error into a PHP7 version check clause, since catch statements do not trigger autoloading since PHP 5.1, so there won’t be an issue on PHP versions below 7.
• The following exceptions should be caught:
  • Exception
  • Error
• Something to consider and test with the implementation is whether the shutdown handler plays well with other shutdown handlers possibly registered by plugins.
• In addition to implementing treatment of the above errors and exceptions, an important item is how to handle multiple broken plugins: In the latest patchpatch A special text file that describes changes to code, by identifying the files and lines which are added, removed, and altered. It may also be referred to as a diff. A patch can be applied to a codebase for testing., when an error is detected and the pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party is paused, the next request might simply do the same thing if another plugin causes a problem. In case many plugins are affected, this presents a significant UXUX User experience issue.
• Therefore a mechanism is needed that detects multiple issues in one go without requiring further user interaction. Redirects and/or AJAX requests are ideas that could be used to accomplish that. @schlessera is going to continue working on that.
• Due to the project becoming increasingly big, it was decided to proceed work through a pull request against a WordPress fork, to have a better overview of the incremental code changes. GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ should only be used for the implementation while discussion can stay on TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress.. A pull request has been opened for that purpose to which the latest patch has been ported over. Note: In order to test the code, it is only necessary to append a .diff extension to the PR.

Next week’s meeting

• Next meeting will take place on Monday, August 6th, 2018 at 15:00 UTC in #core-php.
• Agenda: Continue discussion on avoiding WSODs in PHP.
• If you have suggestions about this but cannot make the meeting, please leave a comment on this post so that we can take them into account.

#core-php, #php, #servehappy, #summary