Doc’s WordPress News Drop is a weekly report on the most pressing WordPress news. When the news drops, I will pick it up and deliver it right to you. This week we caught up with Dwayne McDaniel at the WPSFO meetup and chatted about the advantages of using the WordPress Command Line Interface (or WP-CLI) for managing your WordPress site.
Whether you’re switching to Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or changing domain names entirely, it can be a daunting task to use MySQL to try and replace all of the old instances of your domain name. For example, should you search for a reliable plugin, or directly manage the database with software such as phpMyAdmin? There’s actually a third way: you can use the WordPress Command Line Interface (WP-CLI) to change domain names in under a minute within your console. You don’t need to know anything about MySQL, and as long as you’re okay with the idea of using the command line, this is […]
The WordPress REST API gets lots of attention, but for many of the same reasons, the WordPress command line interface — WP-CLI — is also worthy of this type of excitement. A REST API and a CLI are essential to modernizing WordPress. Like the REST API, WP-CLI is an alternative way of manipulating data on a WordPress site. Using simple commands you can change a user’s password, bulk import posts, activate a theme, and so much more. The WP-CLI is a community project that is led by Daniel Bachhuber. It was recently announced that the project would become an official […]
WordPress features an intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI) that enables users to develop their sites with ease. However, putting ease of use first sometimes results in less than ideal efficiency, and WordPress falls into that trap in some aspects. Working with the WordPress Command Line Interface (WP-CLI) tool will enable you to tackle administrative tasks more efficiently. For instance, if you wanted to create a child theme manually, you’d need to go through several steps. Using WP-CLI, you can get it done with a single command. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the different ways you can use WP-CLI to speed up WordPress development, […]
Daniel Bachhuber’s Kickstarter went live only two days ago and already it is more than fully funded. Bachhuber, who maintains WP-CLI, says he’s still in shock at just how quickly the project surpassed its $17,500 goal. According to the Kickstarter page, “WP-CLI and the WP REST API offer CRUD interfaces to WordPress, and the functional components for WP-CLI’s internals are duplicated by WP REST API endpoints. By using WP REST API endpoints to power WP-CLI, we can remove a lot of code from WP-CLI.” This means that developers can push and pull posts and other REST API data with only a […]
Plugins are my bread and butter. I spend a great deal of time using them, organizing them, and evaluating them. Many WordPress users out there probably have a few groups of plugins they like to start sites off with. One set for client sites, another for blogs, another for test sites, etc. But keeping track of these various groups and manually installing them to every fresh WordPress install can be a bit of a hassle. Luckily, there are a few ways to approach the task. The Simple Way Fortunately, there are tools out there that allow you to group plugins together, and […]
Some of you may have seen the announcement of a new WP-CLI package known as Dictator. Dictator allows you to define the “state” of your WordPress install. It keeps a running record of your WordPress configuration options, broken up into three categories. “Settings” stores basic site information like title, description, and active theme and plugins. “Users” stores the name, email, and display_name of each user. “Terms” holds categories, tags, and other post metadata. All of this information is stored neatly in a small YAML config file. That way, you can hand off a config file to various members of a […]
On March 31, Daniel Bachhuber announced the release of Dictator. Dictator aims to alleviate the difficulties of website configuration by providing users with the ability to easily configure WordPress to YAML state files. This has been cultivated through the way that Dictator understands WordPress as states. Bachhuber breaks down exactly what states are in the announcement: States are collections of regions. Each state file has the state declaration along with tracked configuration details for each region. Regions have a defined schema which produces the translation between the human-readable YAML file and how WordPress stores state in the database. Additionally, Dictator provides users with the […]
Anyone who has been using WordPress for a while has probably had at least one case where an update or change didn’t work out as planned, and you had to revert to backups. Or maybe you want to try some development on your site and need the results to be live on the internet. Whatever the reason, when creating a clone of your website to be hosted at another address (for example test.website.com, next to website.com) you have probably followed the Codex page on moving your site and spent some time changing the configuration and searching and replacing the old URL […]
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