Coding Conventions: Keep Your Code Clean and Stylish

When working on a project it is important to keep your code efficient in both execution and appearance. All projects, especially web projects, will need to be maintained on some level. One way to make this easier is by adhering to the code conventions, or style guide, set up within your development team or community.

A good example of this is the WordPress Development Best Practices. As an open source project with thousands of contributors, it was important for the community to set up standards to ensure the quality and accessibility of the code for both the users and developers. Every coding language used in the project has these standards set up. This enables theme, plugin and core contributors to produce easy to read and understand code, allowing for better collaboration with one another.

Conventions and style are also important to consider with your own development work. Whether you are working in a large group or alone, keeping to a code convention will allow you and others to look at the finished product understand how and why you built it the way you did.

Here at Hall we work with both open source community and our own internal code style guides. It is important to remember also that both a project’s code and style guides are living documents that serve more as guidelines than hard and fast rules.

As technologies and development communities change, your code style guides will need to evolve. Everyone brings their own thoughts and styles on how projects should be built. Keep this in mind as you create and use your own style guide and know there are many resources out there that you can pull from.

Ultimately, remember to keep to a coding convention while maintaining an open mind, because as is the nature of technology, things could always change tomorrow.

Resources:

Why Coding Style Matters

Google Coding Conventions

Mozilla Coding Conventions

GitHub Coding Conventions

List of CSS Style Guides

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