Daniel Bachhuber, the current maintainer of WP-CLI, announced today that his Kickstarter campaign to develop a more RESTful WP-CLI is now complete. The original goal of $17,500 was fully funded within 12 hours of launching the campaign, pushing it onto the stretch goal where every additional $100 raised equals one hour of his time towards the WP REST API project in 2016.
As Bachhuber is also a strong contributor on the WP REST API team, he is uniquely positioned to tackle the goal of this project – to get all WP REST API endpoints registered via plugins and themes to be automagically usable as WP-CLI commands.
WP-CLI is one of the most indispensable tools for WordPress developers, so it’s not surprising that the campaign ended with 187% funding, $32,822 raised via 107 backers. Rewards for the higher tiers of support include consultation and education on advanced uses of WP-CLI and the WP REST API.
Bachhuber announced the end of the campaign in a note published today, which concludes with questions he hopes to explore through his work in 2016.
“Once you have the WP REST API, what is the single compelling reason to use WordPress?” he asked. “Or, why use WordPress at all? Gut reaction from creating my first React + WP app today: I don’t need WordPress. I just need the easiest way to create a powerful REST API.
As the technology around WordPress continues to evolve, Bachhuber sees WordPress as the representation of a set of ideals.
“I believe WordPress is the embodiment of core philosophies, rather than a specific manifestation of software: ownership over personal data, design for the users, commitment to backwards compatibility, etc.,” Bachhuber said.
“To get to 100%, WordPress needs to interoperate with every part of the web.”
Bachhuber will be working on the project during the first six months of 2016. He plans to post bi-weekly progress updates to the WP-CLI blog and will cross-post to Kickstarter as well.
It is unfortunate that the additional verbage cast a doubt on how well he understands wordpress eco system and therefor his ability to deliver a useful functioning product. It is unfortunate because the goal itself is worthy and doable and he is a good coder.
I am not sure the end result will be truly useful to anyone as the same goal can be achieved in different more direct methods (an alternative approach is for plugins to add a manifest of public API that can be used by WP-CLI), but what actual users prefer to use is very hard to predict.