October Coding Practices

October CMS Coding Practices

Application skill for October CMS developer guidelines ingest (awesome-guidelines). Generic PHP: php-coding-practices. Sibling CMS: magento-coding-practices, drupal-coding-practices, wordpress-coding-practices.

Core Principle

October maintainability is PSR layout plus marketplace naming discipline, camelCase PHP with snake_case at persistence/UI boundaries, consistent plugin codes and table prefixes, Rain exception types, and semver-backed composer packages.

When to Use / NOT

• October CMS plugins, themes, and marketplace-bound packages.
• Reviewing Plugin.php, models, backend controllers, components, .htm views, migrations.
• Preparing composer.json for -plugin/-theme publish.

NOT when:

• Non-October PHP, php-coding-practices.
• Other CMS stacks, sibling CMS practice skills.
• Pure Laravel apps without October plugin structure.
• Client-hosted legacy October 1.x without composer plugins, adapt naming; publishing rules may differ.

Workflow

1. PHP/PSR, PSR base, camelCase/snake_case, AJAX carve-outs (october-style-php-psr.md).
2. Naming, vendor, DB, MVC, views, events (october-style-naming-patterns.md).
3. Classes/exceptions, visibility, Rain exceptions (october-style-class-exceptions.md).
4. Packages/verify, composer, semver, MySQL strict (october-style-packages-verify.md).

Red Flags

• Lowercase or dashed vendor/plugin code (acme.blog)
• camelCase DB column conflicting with model property names
• Boolean DB column without is_ prefix when clash risk exists
• Partial view missing the leading _
• View not using .htm extension
• Component name colliding with model/controller
• Event named with onSomething instead of before/after semantics
• Generic \Exception for user-facing validation message
• SystemException for simple form validation users should see
• Composer package name missing -plugin or -theme suffix
• Breaking API change shipped as patch/minor semver tag
• All-private class intended as extension base
• MySQL strict mode disabled during active schema development

Verification

• PHPCS PSR-1/2 on changed plugin PHP (document October control-flow exceptions)
• Naming checklist: vendor code, tables, views, components, events
• composer.json name/type/suffix review before publish
• Semver tag + version file bump alignment
• MySQL STRICT_TRANS_TABLES enabled in dev environment
• Exception type spot-check on new throw sites

References

• awesome-guidelines/references/october-style-learning-note.md
• awesome-guidelines/references/october-style-php-psr.md
• awesome-guidelines/references/october-style-naming-patterns.md
• awesome-guidelines/references/october-style-class-exceptions.md
• awesome-guidelines/references/october-style-packages-verify.md

Related skills

• php-coding-practices, PSR baseline outside October
• git-workflow-and-versioning, semver for published packages
• magento-coding-practices, sibling commerce CMS conventions
• drupal-coding-practices, sibling CMS conventions
• wordpress-coding-practices, sibling CMS conventions