WP-CLI

WordPress supply chain security: auditing plugins and themes Every plugin and theme is code from someone else running with full access to your site. The supply chain risk is real: a plugin author’s account is compromised and a malicious update goes out, an abandoned plugin is bought and “updated” with a backdoor, or a premium…

PHP generators and yield: memory-efficient data processing in WordPress A generator is a function with yield: instead of building a full array and returning it, it hands out one value at a time and pauses until the caller asks for the next one. For WordPress jobs over large data sets (going through all products, exporting…

Custom WP-CLI commands for a plugin’s maintenance tasks Every plugin with real data sooner or later needs tasks that do not belong in the admin: re-sync 20,000 products with an API, rebuild a lookup table, clean up after a failed import. A shell script that chains wp eval calls is fragile. A WP-CLI command of…

WP-Cron in depth: reliable scheduled tasks in WordPress WP-Cron is a pseudo-cron: there is no daemon. On page loads WordPress checks the list of scheduled events (the cron option), and if one is due, it sends a non-blocking request to wp-cron.php, which runs the events in the background. On a site with constant traffic this…

Create WooCommerce variable products and variations with PHP Importing a catalogue from an old shop system often means hundreds of products with size and colour combinations. The WooCommerce CRUD classes create them in a few dozen lines: a WC_Product_Variable parent with its attributes, and one WC_Product_Variation per combination with price, SKU and stock.

Back up and restore a WordPress MySQL database with mysqldump and cron A backup is only as good as the restore. This article is about the database part: a daily compressed dump with a retention policy, a copy outside the server, a dedicated backup user, and the restore procedure, tested before it is needed. For…

WP-CLI aliases and shell functions for local development WP-CLI can run commands against other installations over SSH: wp @production plugin list lists the plugins on the live server, wp @staging db export makes a dump on staging. With aliases for every environment and two or three shell functions, pulling a fresh copy of the live…

Write unit tests for WordPress plugins with PHPUnit and WP-CLI scaffolding WordPress unit tests run against a real WordPress loaded with a separate test database. Every test runs inside a database transaction that is rolled back afterwards, so each test starts from a clean state. WP-CLI generates the whole setup, and the base class WP_UnitTestCase…

Remove WordPress database bloat including orphaned postmeta rows, unlimited post revisions, expired transients, and spam comments with safe SQL queries and WP-CLI commands.