Daniel Bachhuber 12:00 am on January 14, 2015  

Version 0.18.0 released

Hello 2015! Here’s your first release for the new year.

Update WP-CLIWP-CLI WP-CLI is the Command Line Interface for WordPress, used to do administrative and development tasks in a programmatic way. The project page is http://wp-cli.org/ https://make.wordpress.org/cli/ using WP-CLI

We’ve made it even easier to keep WP-CLI up to date. If you’re using the Phar file and it’s writable, you can call wp cli update to install the latest version.

$ ./wp-cli.0.17.1.phar cli update
You have version 0.17.1. Would you like to update to 0.18.0? [y/n] y
Downloading from https://github.com/wp-cli/wp-cli/releases/download/v0.18.0/wp-cli.phar...
New version works. Proceeding to replace.
Success: Updated WP-CLI to 0.18.0

Of course, if you’ve installed WP-CLI via Composer or GitGit Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. Most modern plugin and theme development is being done with this version control system. https://git-scm.com/., you should run master to always get the latest and greatest.

Manage post and user terms

WP-CLI supports managing terms associated with posts and users:

$ wp post term add 1 post_tag foo
Success: Added term.

$ wp post term add 1 post_tag bar
Success: Added term.

$ wp post term list 1 post_tag
+---------+------+------+----------+
| term_id | name | slug | taxonomy |
+---------+------+------+----------+
| 4       | bar  | bar  | post_tag |
| 3       | foo  | foo  | post_tag |
+---------+------+------+----------+

$ wp post term remove 1 post_tag foo bar
Success: Deleted term.

Consistent behavor for pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party activation and deactivation

We’ve cleaned up the behavior for activating and deactivating plugins:

  • If a plugin is already active, it’s allowed to become network active.
  • If a plugin is already network active, it’s not allowed to become active.
  • Network active plugins must be deactivated with the --network flag.
  • A warning will be thrown when an inactive plugin is attempted to be deactivated.

Previously, the behavior was quite inconsistent — sometimes you’d get errors, sometimes silent success, etc.

What’s coming in 2015

If I may editorialize a bit, I think 2015 could be an interesting year for WP-CLI.

The WP-API project has more overlap than you may think. The task of building a RESTful APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. for WordPress is also a task of preparing a useful abstraction to interact with WordPress internals. Instead of directly calling wp_update_post(), the API uses WP_JSON_Posts_Controller::update_item(), which is a consistent interface with WP_JSON_Terms_Controller::update_item() and WP_JSON_Users_Controller::update_item().

Similarly, we too have had to invent our own pattern of abstraction for interacting with WordPress internals. It would be nice if we could drop much of our code, and leverage WP-API instead. And, what if WP_JSON_Controller was the pattern we adopted for listing, getting, creating, updating, or deleting any WordPress primitive, which means that plugins implementing it would automatically have WP-CLI commands?

Plus, I’d think it would be quiet useful to have feature parity between what I can do locally with WP-CLI, and what I can do against a remote site via WP-API.

Other changes

Enhancements:

  • Migrate users between sites in one go — wp user import-csv <file> supports CSV produced by wp user list --format=csv > <file>.
  • Use wp user list --network to list all users in your network.
  • All subcommand help docs also include global parameters, to give those global parameters more visibility.
  • If --help flag is passed, a command will now show the help screen instead of erroring on invalid parameters. Useful for debugging aforementioned errored parameters.
  • Similar to --skip-plugins=<plugin>,<plugin>, the --skip-themes global parameter allows you to skip loading specific themes when using WP-CLI. If you run a hosting company, this can be a useful way to blacklist known problem themes when performing maintenance.
  • wp core language improvements: Use wp core language list --fields=language --status=active to get the active language; install and activate a language with wp core language install <language> --activate; active language can’t be uninstalled.
  • wp (post|comment|term|user) get <object-id> supports --fields parameter for getting specific fields.
  • Use wp post update <object-id> to update a post’s content from a <file>.
  • Activate all installed plugins at once with wp plugin activate --all.
  • wp plugin list now indicates version numbers for mu plugins when they have properly formatted plugin headers.
  • Added support for specifying any version for wp plugin update <plugin>... --version=<version>. Previously, the parameter only supported ‘dev’.
  • wp option update <name> <value> will supply a friendly message when the option is already set to the supplied value.
  • Added alias from wp theme uninstall to wp theme delete, giving greater parity between theme and plugin interfaces.
  • Adopted a Debian package build script.

Bug fixes:

  • Resolved a nasty file cache collision between wp core update and wp core download. WP_CLICoreUpgrader was renaming ZIP files to .tar.gz, which wp core download would then attempt to use.
  • If a file required by wp-cli.yml or --require is missing, WP-CLI will throw a human-friendly error instead of fataling.
  • wp cli info runs early to protect from invalid runtime configurations.
  • wp core config will only define WPLANG for WP < 4.0.
  • /bin/install-wp-tests.sh fixes: Properly marked executable when scaffolding plugin unit tests; works on older versions of Bash; added support for WP_CORE_DIR environment variable.
  • wp comment (approve|unapprove) will actually change comment status.
  • wp_is_mobile() is defined, avoiding fatals in some themes and plugins.
  • Windows fixes: disabled colors by default; allows deleting plugins that aren’t in folders (e.g. Hello Dolly).
  • Throws an error when trying to get metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. on a missing object, instead of silently failing.
  • Throws an error when trying to install multisiteMultisite Multisite is a WordPress feature which allows users to create a network of sites on a single WordPress installation. Available since WordPress version 3.0, Multisite is a continuation of WPMU or WordPress Multiuser project. WordPress MultiUser project was discontinued and its features were included into WordPress core.https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network. with subdomains when domain is localhost.
  • Doesn’t force update check on wp plugin install to reduce dependency on WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/.

You can browse the full list of resolved issues on GithubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/.

Contributors to this release: viper007bond, boonebgorges, borekb, bparbs, danielbachhuber, here, miya0001, nyordanov, oneumyvakin, ozh, pippinsplugins, rodrigoprimo, spacedmonkey, ntwb, lordspace, szepeviktor, tiagohillebrandt, wturrell