Discover in this tutorial how to define a development mode (core, theme, plugin…) in a WordPress installation using code.
In WordPress 5.5, the option to define a development environment with the WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE constant was added. In a previous tutorial you saw to use it to set the environment as production, development, staging or local.
With the arrival of WordPress 6.3 this option is complemented by a new constant called WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE which allows you to indicate what type of development you are working in.
The values that can be assigned are:
- An empty string (default): if you are not going to use it for development.
core: if you are using it for development related to WordPress core.- plugin: if you’re using it for plugin development.
- theme: if you use it for theme development.
- all: if you use it for development of everything mentioned above.
For now there aren’t many things that WordPress will run differently, but if you use core or theme mode it won’t cache the theme.json file, which can be very handy. Over time, more functionality will be added.
The nice thing about this is that it also opens the door to use different configurations depending on the environment.
Let’s see how you can define it:
Snippet to define a development mode in WordPress
Add the following snippet somewhere before the line containing “/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy publishing.*/” in wp-config.php file:
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Done!
In this case, you are indicating that the development mode is 'plugin', but you could use any of the ones mentioned at the beginning.
Once defined you can use the function wp_is_development_mode(), where you pass the parameter $mode (core, plugin, theme or all), to get different behaviors depending on the working environment.
Conclusions
Now you know how to define the development mode of your WordPress installation (core, theme, plugins…).
This opens the door to create functions that only run when you are in a particular development mode.
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