Community Summit: Contributing to WP-CLI

“Contributing to 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/” was the second of two discussions we held at the Community Summit. For notes from the first, see details embedded in the feature development post.

We began the conversation by giving an overview to the current contribution process. Notably:

• We have a primary Contributing document that links to further detail on submitting a bug report and creating a pull request.
• Our documentation is produced in the wp-cli/handbook repo and pulled into WordPress.org site with a WordPress plugin.
• Command and internal 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. documentation are dynamically generated from the codebase with a WP-CLI command and rendered into standalone markdown files.

From the introduction, the conversation turned more free-form. In no particular order, some highlights:

• One big challenge is that WP-CLI is a rather complex project and assumes a lot of knowledge from a contributor. When onboarding new contributors, they have to learn two things: the process for contributing, and how everything works (without reading the code). Although the internals page is reasonably helpful, it doesn’t cover the command execution flow. Having a flow document would be useful.
• One observation is that potential contributors can enter the project in different ways (e.g. 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/ repo for a custom command vs. a third-party tutorial on how to use WP-CLI). Documentation primarily provides a linear path.
• We’re seeing some contributors submit documentation but not a ton. It’s unclear whether this indicates the documentation is good enough, or whether the path to contributing documentation is too confusing. It’d be helpful to see more users open questions about the documentation, as a way of validating/improving the content.
• Another challenge is that generally of WP-CLI tools is that the user knows the abstract problem, but not which command addresses the problem. Related to this:
  • It would be useful if a help command also included the URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org for more information.
  • It’d be nice if you could easily see a tree of all commands.

Thanks to everyone who participated!