The Disable Emoji’s WordPress plugin has been sitting around collecting digital dust for way too long. Every time I opened the repo I’d cringe a little, then promptly close the tab. But not today.

Most of my attention is on Laravel work these days, but I’ve still got a handful of WordPress plugins out in the wild, including this one with a whopping 60,000 active users. I owe it to the people still using them to not let the code rot. So here we are.

Disable Emoji’s repo

What changed

  • Dumped the spaghetti for PSR-4 autoloading via Composer. The classmap era is over.
  • PHPStan for PHP static analysis.
  • PHP-CS-Fixer with PSR-12. I love my tabs, but the PHP world moved on.
  • PHPUnit tests.
  • GitHub Actions CI that runs all of the above on every push.
  • Auto-generated readme.txt from the README because WordPress.org lives in 2003.

The code still does the same one thing (disable emojis — it’s in the name), but now it does it like a professional adult.

Lesson learned

Don’t wait 3+ years between modernization sprints. It hurts less if you do it incrementally. Going forward I’m going to be better about keeping my WP plugins up to date, even if Laravel is where my head’s at most days.