Identifying and Locating Interference Issues in PHP Applications: The Case of WordPress. Eshkevari, L., Antoniol, G., Cordy, J. R., & Di Penta, M. In Proceedings of the 22Nd International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), pages 157--167, 2014. ACM.
abstract   bibtex   
The large success of Content management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress is largely due to the rich ecosystem of themes and plugins developed around the CMS that allows users to easily build and customize complex Web applications featuring photo galleries, contact forms, and blog pages. However, the design of the CMS, the plugin-based architecture, and the implicit characteristics of the programming language used to develop them (often PHP), can cause interference or unwanted side effects between the resources declared and used by different plugins. This paper describes the problem of interference between plugins in CMS, specifically those developed using PHP, and outlines an approach combining static and dynamic analysis to detect and locate such interference. Results of a case study conducted over 10 WordPress plugins shows that the analysis can help to identify and locate plugin interference, and thus be used to enhance CMS quality assurance.
@INPROCEEDINGS{Eshkevari-2014-ICPC,
   AUTHOR       = {Laleh Eshkevari and Giuliano Antoniol and James R. Cordy and 
      Di Penta, Massimiliano},
   BOOKTITLE    = {Proceedings of the 22Nd International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)},
   TITLE        = {Identifying and Locating Interference Issues in PHP 
      Applications: The Case of WordPress},
   YEAR         = {2014},
   OPTADDRESS   = {},
   OPTCROSSREF  = {},
   OPTEDITOR    = {},
   OPTMONTH     = {},
   OPTNOTE      = {},
   OPTNUMBER    = {},
   OPTORGANIZATION = {},
   PAGES        = {157--167},
   PUBLISHER    = {ACM},
   OPTSERIES    = {},
   OPTVOLUME    = {},
   KEYWORDS     = {Code and design smells, ICPC},
   ABSTRACT     = {The large success of Content management Systems (CMS) 
      such as WordPress is largely due to the rich ecosystem of themes and 
      plugins developed around the CMS that allows users to easily build 
      and customize complex Web applications featuring photo galleries, 
      contact forms, and blog pages. However, the design of the CMS, the 
      plugin-based architecture, and the implicit characteristics of the 
      programming language used to develop them (often PHP), can cause 
      interference or unwanted side effects between the resources declared 
      and used by different plugins. This paper describes the problem of 
      interference between plugins in CMS, specifically those developed 
      using PHP, and outlines an approach combining static and dynamic 
      analysis to detect and locate such interference. Results of a case 
      study conducted over 10 WordPress plugins shows that the analysis can 
      help to identify and locate plugin interference, and thus be used to 
      enhance CMS quality assurance. }
}

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