wp-browser 4 RC1

June 19, 2023

When I started working on the branch called version-4/minimum-compat-pass in May last year, I thought updating wp-browser to be compatible with Codeception version 5 in a minimal way would have been a matter of a few weeks.
The idea was to fix the most glaring issues of the WordPress testing framework and then move on to a more thorough refactoring of the codebase.

I was wrong.

The first pass took a year and a month and it's now available as a release candidate in the branch v4.

Not because of Codeception, but because of 9 years of code I had to Mary-Kondo through. My love for the craft of code, which to this day is still raging, made it very difficult for me to overlook the many issues I found in the codebase and I ended up rewriting most of it.

My first commit was on June 16, 2014; I knew so little about PHP I believed all the following to be true:

  1. I cannot write code without PHPUnit tests or the plugin repository will reject my plugin.
  2. No company would work with a PHP developer that does not test her code.
  3. Every one uses XDebug.

There is no judgement here, I was just naive and I had no idea what I was doing.

Being a first pass, it's still not yet all the things I want it to be, but it's a good start and it is, above all, compatible with Codeception version 5, PHP 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2.

Where possible, I tried to keep back compatibility with existing tests: I'm an avid user of my own framework and I didn't want to have to rewrite all my tests to use the new version. Some tests will need rewriting, though, and I'll try to document them as I go and find out.

Next steps are, in an order I wish I will respect but likely won't:

  1. Documentation update to reflect the changes in the new version.
  2. A new first setup experience leveraging containers for a no-hassle setup for theme, plugins and site projects.
  3. A new test case, provisionally called SuperWordPressTestCase (no jokes) to leverage the new features of the framework.

I'm also planning to write a series of posts on the new features of the framework and what they bring to the table in terms of new possible use cases.