# Coding Standards (PHPCS and PHPMD)

Automated testing doesn’t mean just functionality — code quality and looks are important too! WordPress coding standards are enforced using the popular [PHP CodeSniffer](https://github.com/squizlabs/PHP_CodeSniffer) tool and code quality is being continuously checked using the [PHP Mess Detector](https://phpmd.org/) rules. The custom rules used by DWS are present in the *phpcs.xml.dist* and *phpmd.xml.dist* files in each public project on [GitHub](https://github.com/deep-web-solutions/).

Basically, this ensures that a few WordPress-specific errors can never occur as long as the tests pass. Here are some examples:

* All output is ran through an escaping function.
* All user input is ran through a sanitization function.
* All translatable strings use the same language domain.
* All global functions/variables/classes are prefixed properly.


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