Port over checks from VIP Scanner into sniffs

[westonruter]

Automattic has a VIP Scanner tool which would greatly benefit from integrating PHP_CodeSniffer. From looking at the tool, the checks are implemented with regular expressions and so they'll be less powerful than PHPCS's sniffs which operate on tokenized streams.

The checks in the VIP Scanner should be ported over to PHPCS sniffs, then a fine-tuned ruleset (to opt-in/opt-out of the relevant rules) could be employed by the VIP Scanner. In effect, the scanner would become just be a wrapper for PHPCS.

[GaryJones]

Can you please create a checkbox list of which checks are still needed?

[jrfnl]

What @GaryJones said 😉 or maybe even better: could separate issues be opened for the checks which are still needed (and which don't already have an issue) ?

Can you please create a checkbox list of which checks are still needed?

[GaryJones]

Shouldn't Automattic be undertaking this change?

[jrfnl]

I'd be very much in favour of that. All the same, there will probably be some checks in there which could benefit the wider WP community - like some existing VIP sniffs already do.
For those, a case can be made to add them to WPCS and it would be useful to get some idea of what we're talking about.

[GaryJones]

While there still might be some ideas worth pulling over into WordPress-Extra, or for A8c to move into their VIP standard, the https://github.com/Automattic/vip-scanner/ repo is now archived, since the VIP scanner is no longer used.

[jrfnl]

@westonruter @GaryJones Can this issue be closed ? If not, it should be made more actionable.