Show whether plugins include WP-CLI commands

[schlessera]

For people managing large numbers of sites, the availability of WP-CLI commands might be a determining factor in picking the right plugins.

I would like to look into adding that information to the plugin directory, in the form of a simple flag or icon for every plugin.

Detecting the presence of integrated WP-CLI should be pretty straightforward, by just checking for the presence of the WP_CLI::add_command string.

Later on, we could even think about how to filter the search for these plugins as well, but just having the information be available should be a first achievable goal.

[obenland]

Feature flags are a slippery slope. I'm not sure that is the best direction for the Plugin Directory to go.
I'd suggest encouraging plugin authors to use a tag instead, like ​wp-cli.

[schlessera]

Do you think it would at least make sense to fetch this information when populating the plugin repository and store it alongside the plugin so that it could be used within searches?

I agree that a convention about using a tag would be an easy and clean solution. However, in my experience, self-tagging produces somewhat random results, with some people forgetting the flags, some people using the wrong one, etc...

The presence of WP-CLI commands is something that can be easily and reliably detected by grepping the source code.

This would be one missing piece of the puzzle to replacing the discovery mechanism of the now deprecated WP-CLI Package Index.

[Ipstenu]

Tags and flags have proven to be both unmanageable and unreliable at scale. We have enough issues with people not editing the tested up to, etc. This would, sadly, be 'one more thing' they would forget to do.

Do you think it would at least make sense to fetch this information when populating the plugin
repository and store it alongside the plugin so that it could be used within searches?

That's an interesting question, but at the moment we're only scanning the readme.txt (which would mean we have this like we have PHP versions and tested up to) and that is, again, hit or miss.

Scanning all files of a plugin when updated for WP_CLI::add_command seems like a nice wish-list item, but possibly impractical at the moment? If it's not, then that would be the way to go. Automated!

[tellyworth]

@schlessera can you outline exactly what problem this would solve, how it would help users, and what it would look like?

It's an interesting idea, but we need a more solid and pragmatic reason than "because we can".

[wojsmol]

Hi
In #cli we are about to release WP-CLI v2.0.0 and we are seriously talking about closing ​http://wp-cli.org/package-index/ for separate packages we have a preliminary replacement plan. During the discussion @schlessera bring up a topic of commands integrated in to plugins and here we are at the point where this ticket was started. Comments are welcome.

[dd32]

Just noting that this could be implemented similar to how Blocks are - The individual plugin pages detects blocks present and lists them on the Plugins page, adding CLI commands there would be possible.

[pbiron]

Replying to tellyworth:

@schlessera can you outline exactly what problem this would solve, how it would help users, and what it would look like?

Coming into this very late and certainly not speaking for Alain, but I think the idea behind the ask is:

• when searching for something like a caching plugin, one consideration in choosing between the many available is whether the operation of the plugin can be controlled via wp-cli