Article

Identifying and locating interference issues in PHP applications: the case of WordPress

Authors:

Laleh Eshkevari,

Giuliano Antoniol,

James R. Cordy,

Massimiliano Di PentaAuthors Info & Claims

ICPC 2014: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Program Comprehension

Pages 157 - 167

https://doi.org/10.1145/2597008.2597153

Published: 02 June 2014 Publication History

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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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Cited By

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Lin JSayagh MHassan A(2023)The Co-evolution of the WordPress Platform and Its PluginsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/353370032:1(1-24)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3533700
Lima ISilva JMiranda BPinto Gd’Amorim M(2021)Exposing bugs in JavaScript engines through test transplantation and differential testingSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-020-09537-8Online publication date: 7-Jan-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-020-09537-8
Lima ICândido Jd’Amorim M(2020)Practical detection of CMS plugin conflicts in large plugin setsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2019.106212118:COnline publication date: 1-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.infsof.2019.106212
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Index Terms

Identifying and locating interference issues in PHP applications: the case of WordPress
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Software management
        Software maintenance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues

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Information

Published In

ICPC 2014: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Program Comprehension

June 2014

325 pages

ISBN:9781450328791

DOI:10.1145/2597008

General Chair:
Chanchal K. Roy
University of Saskatchewan, Canada
,
Program Chairs:
Andrew Begel
Microsoft Research, USA
,
Leon Moonen
Simula Research Laboratory, Norway

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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TCSE: IEEE Computer Society's Tech. Council on Software Engin.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 June 2014

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ICSE '14

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SIGSOFT

ICSE '14: 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

June 2 - 3, 2014

Hyderabad, India

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ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

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Cited By

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Lin JSayagh MHassan A(2023)The Co-evolution of the WordPress Platform and Its PluginsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/353370032:1(1-24)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3533700
Lima ISilva JMiranda BPinto Gd’Amorim M(2021)Exposing bugs in JavaScript engines through test transplantation and differential testingSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-020-09537-8Online publication date: 7-Jan-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-020-09537-8
Lima ICândido Jd’Amorim M(2020)Practical detection of CMS plugin conflicts in large plugin setsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2019.106212118:COnline publication date: 1-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.infsof.2019.106212
Moslehi PAdams BRilling JZaidman AKamei YHill E(2018)Feature location using crowd-based screencastsProceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3196398.3196439(192-202)Online publication date: 28-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3196398.3196439
Patra JDixit PPradel MChaudron MCrnkovic IChechik MHarman M(2018)ConflictJSProceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3180155.3180184(741-751)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3180155.3180184
Sayagh MKerzazi NAdams BUchitel SOrso ARobillard M(2017)On cross-stack configuration errorsProceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2017.31(255-265)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE.2017.31
Ahmad WKästner CSunshine JAldrich JKim MRobbes RBird C(2016)Inter-app communication in AndroidProceedings of the 13th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/2901739.2901762(177-188)Online publication date: 14-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2901739.2901762
Hills M(2016)Navigating the WordPress plugin landscape2016 IEEE 24th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)10.1109/ICPC.2016.7503709(1-10)Online publication date: May-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC.2016.7503709
Eshkevari LDos Santos FCordy JAntoniol G(2015)Are PHP applications ready for Hack?2015 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER.2015.7081816(63-72)Online publication date: Mar-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER.2015.7081816
Hills MKlint PVinju JCrnkovic IChechik MGrünbacher P(2014)Static, lightweight includes resolution for PHPProceedings of the 29th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/2642937.2643017(503-514)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2642937.2643017

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