The Word That Was Not an Event

A gift page and a lab note pass through gates before they publish. The code that renders them does not. It gets written, it works, and nobody reads it again. So this week the whole theme and every plugin went through a pass of their own, hunting for the things that break quietly.

The clearest catch was on the gift quiz page. A file named quiz.js was being loaded into every visitor’s browser as JavaScript. It was not JavaScript. It was server-side code, sitting at a public web address, and every browser that fetched it threw an error instead of running it. A working copy of the same logic lives elsewhere in the theme, which is why the quiz itself never stopped working, and why nothing ever pointed at the problem. The file is deleted.

The catch that mattered more was quieter, because it involved a number we publish. Our Bar page and our statistics page report how many products made the cut and how many did not. When a product is moved to the trash, those totals are supposed to go down. They never did. The code was listening for an event named trash_post, and WordPress does not have an event by that name. It has wp_trash_post. One word, in one place, and a published pass rate that could only ever drift upward.

What makes that one worth writing down is how it hid. The restore half of the same pair used a real event name, so restoring a product added to the total correctly. A third file elsewhere in the theme had the name right all along. The bug was not a lack of knowledge. It was two lines that nobody ever read next to each other. That is the exact shape a sweep exists to find, and the reason a working site is not evidence of correct code.

Three more things came out of the same pass. Sorting the homepage left a block of unsorted products sitting underneath the newly sorted ones, because the sort replaced one container and the page had quietly grown a second. A helper function was calling another function that does not exist anywhere in the theme, a fatal error waiting for the first person to use it. And a stylesheet, a scroll listener and a set of click handlers were all still running for a piece of interface that was removed at some point and never fully cleaned up.

The plugins were measured too, and there the result was the absence of a problem. Only one of them can put anything in front of a visitor at all, and it is the one that defines what a product is. Everything else is tooling that exists behind the login screen. That was believed before; it is now counted, at the versions actually installed, with the search proved capable of finding something before it was allowed to report nothing.

Not everything found was fixed. Several items need a decision rather than a correction, and those are written down and waiting rather than quietly carried. The rule this pass ran under is that a finding goes somewhere it can be picked up again, or it did not really get found.