WordCamp Europe and the WP-CLI

Pantheon was proud to sponsor and participate in WordCamp Europe 2019 in Berlin, June 20-22, 2019.  Our Developer Programs Engineer Andrew Taylor had a chance to sit down with Alain Schlesser, founder of Bright Nucleus and current maintainer of the WordPress Command Line Interface project, or as it is better known, the WP-CLI. They talked about Berlin, as well as the current and the future development of the WP-CLI.  Watch the full interview, as well as some highlights, with links below.

Note: Pardon the background noise, but with 3,200 attendees at the event, finding a quiet space proved difficult.

Pantheon sponsoring WP-CLI

In order to keep long term contribution to WP-CLI sustainable and avoid burnout, Alain enlisted sponsors to help fund his efforts. Alain sees sponsorship as critical for projects like WP-CLI, which need regular maintenance to continue working properly as WordPress core continues to change. 

Things WP-CLI can do that most people don’t know about

One of Alain's favorite features is the ability to control sites remotely with ‘aliases.’ You can even group aliases to control entire groups of WordPress websites.

Another major feature is the ‘shell’ command, which gives users a dynamic PHP environment with WordPress, plugins and themes running. This is very useful for experimentation and debugging.  

Lastly, WP-CLI has a global parameter ‘--prompt,’ which will interactively prompt you for the information needed to complete the current command. This is useful when you are unsure of which options to use.  

WP-CLI Scaffold 

One of Andrew’s favorite features is the ‘scaffold’ command, which will scaffold templates of common use cases, such as a custom plugin or a whole new Gutenberg block with a single, simple command.

The Scaffold feature is one of Alain’s focus areas right now. He is rethinking this area, as the current code that is produced is "how we were supposed to do things," instead of, "how we are supposed to be doing them currently or with an eye for the future." He thinks Scaffold can be reimagined as an educational tool that teaches best practices, not just the "WordPress way."

Pantheon is proud to sponsor the WP-CLI project.  We are also glad we can offer all of our users access to the tool through our command line interface, Terminus by default.  Do you have a favorite WP-CLI command or favorite Terminus command?  Let us know in the comments.