WordPress is one of the worst examples you could ever point a new PHP developer to. A friend once pointed me to Automattic as an entity to work for (on WordPres

WordPress is one of the worst examples you could ever point a new PHP developer to. A friend once pointed me to Automattic as an entity to work for (on WordPress) as a nomad developer. I took one look at wp-login.php in the root directory and after 30 seconds of reading, knew I could never take the people that work on that codebase seriously. The first line of the file is "require( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-load.php' );". a) "require" is a statement, not a function; it should not have parentheses around it at all. b) Oh. my. god. Their coding standard require spaces inside parentheses; I have never seen this in any language, even from legacy codebases or esoteric developers - it's incomprehensible that some senior developer managed to enforce this on the entire company. c) Oh, mixed PHP class and HTML; a 1000 line file for a login script. RUN! SERIOUSLY, RUN AWAY! After this many years, backwards compatibility is not an excuse. WordPress should be avoided at all costs, unless it is the only way you believe you can build and sustain your business. If you have the choice to take any other avenue, take it. The developers working there have no clue, and/or are content with a status quo that is 20 years behind acceptable standards.