Hold changed lines and new files to the full WordPress standard

[obenland]

Let's use WordPress as our coding standard. With AI writing most of our code now, it's trivial to have it conform new and updated code to the full standard, and everyone reading the code get to benefit from it.

What

Adds phpcs-clean.xml.dist — the stock WordPress coding standard with no sniff exclusions — and points the branch linter (.github/bin/phpcs-branch.php) at it. Newly written code is now held to the unmodified standard, while the existing tree is only ever checked on the lines a branch actually touches.

How it works

The linter already scopes itself to changed lines + new files:

• Modified files → phpcs-changed, reporting only on lines the branch changed.
• New files → full phpcs on the whole file.

Both paths now pass --standard=./phpcs-clean.xml.dist. Existing code is untouched until someone edits it.

Scope of each ruleset

File	Standard	Used by
phpcs.xml.dist	WordPress + ~50 exclusions	composer lint (whole repo) — unchanged
phpcs-clean.xml.dist	Stock WordPress, no exclusions	phpcs-branch.php (changed lines + new files)

phpcs-clean.xml.dist keeps only the environment config (minimum_wp_version, testVersion, PHPCompatibilityWP) and the shared file/vendor exclude-patterns.

Note

The stock WordPress.WP.Capabilities sniff is now active on changed code and will flag wporg-specific custom capabilities as unknown. When that happens, the cap gets documented in place rather than silenced:

<rule ref="WordPress.WP.Capabilities">
    <properties>
        <property name="custom_capabilities" type="array">
            <element value="plugin_admin_edit" />
        </property>
    </properties>
</rule>

Because this only fires on changed lines and new files, the list grows only with caps that actually touch new code.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_0178d9rQN6YbCuz5LetN7Rzi

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[obenland]

Superseded by #771: since CI only enforces the ruleset on changed lines and new files, stripping the exclusions from the single phpcs.xml.dist achieves the same goal without a second config that can drift from what CI enforces (see 8374429). The clean-config copy here also predated the fixes in #771 (stale *.js[x]? exclude patterns, unescaped shell arguments in the branch script).