Even the free version is good beyond belief!

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Disclaimer: I am an amateur programmer — not a professional one (in the sense that nobody pays me to do any programming). PHP is one of the programming languages that I’m reasonably familiar with; I’m not a complete stranger of the WordPress development environment, while not being a “power user” but merely a “tinkerer”, even though I do have the odd plugin published here on the Plugin Library (they’re all extremely simple).

Every now and then, I come across a very specific request from a customer, which is not covered by the theme/template/framework I’ve got to work with. Obviously, I can create my own plugin from scratch, or possibly clone the theme as a child theme, and add whatever is needed there. But this quickly gets out of hand: the “line of code needed on this page” suddenly becomes a whole block requiring parameters, then the same code needs to be placed elsewhere on the site as well, or perhaps turned into a widget on the sidebar, but then those parameters need a shortcode to make them easier to insert by the authors (who have no access to the PHP backend, of course), and so forth. How often have you come across that very issue? Well, in my case, I would say “almost on every project”, with very few exceptions. Even by own personal blog has some hacking in it!

Enter WPCode. Even the free version allows you to do a ton of things without worrying about setting things up properly (i.e. creating a scaffolding for shortcodes, to give a good example) and the need to maintain them, tracking them “elsewhere”. You simply edit your PHP code directly into the plugin and save it as a snippet. Then you call it from wherever you wish. There is nothing else to tweak, or change, or remember to do before moving to a different platform, etc. — you just make sure the plugin gets activated.

While the commercial version includes some nifty features such as full versioning and the ability to save those snippets remotely on the WPCode Library — where they can be reused across projects and/or even made public for others to use on their projects as well — the free version is not crippled in any form; it does what it promises, and does it well enough.

Kudos for the Dark Mode (ah, I yearn for having it across all of WordPress…) and the cool design of the (admin) interface. It’s not 100% canonical regarding the WordPress “best practices”, but as you all know, these are hopelessly outdated anyway. WPCode looks & feels good, it smells of professionalism, and has all sorts of cues and hints that you expect from something where you’re going to edit code (no, it’s not a simple adaptation of the “HTML” widget/Gutenberg block and its limited abilities…).

Allegedly, the commercial version throws in syntax checking on demand, as well as auto-complete for WordPress functions and several other bells and whistles, turning your WP admin panel in a full-fledged “WordPress Programming IDE”, so to speak (or almost!). But I can imagine that in most scenarios, this won’t be what people use it for, but rather to have the ability to grab one of the many snippets contributed to the WPCode Snipper Library and simply tweak them to do what you need. You can have much more than that, though — it even includes a “WP Query Generator”, which provides a reasonably good scaffolding (strongly inspired on the official WordPress documentation!) to quickly create queries — even the most obscure ones! — using a menu and clicking on settings and forms. Then, after the query is generated (which happens instantly, in my experience), you can start to fiddle with it and adapt it to your specific needs. Made a mistake?… Oops, no problem, you can always go back, even on the free version (the paid one, as said, includes a full versioning system).

The ability to inject — safely! — arbitrary PHP code is the kind of thing that might be dangerous to do (exposing the WP innards to the web developer!), but it’s also powerful, and much easier to do than manually editing files on disk. If you require that kind of thing — and, these days, who doesn’t? — you will love WPCode, and wonder why nobody thought of this before?

(The short answer is: aye, there are alternative plugins to do the same thing; don’t worry, WPCode will be able to import their data automatically as well ? )

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