An example command for WP-CLI, to import content from a custom CMS's database. You can just read right through master and follow the comments, or go through it step-by-step through the other branches.

This example was presented at the Boston WP Meetup in May 2013. The slides accompanying it can be found here.

The starter script that this leads to is in the starter-script branch.

In this step we've created our-plugin.php & our-cli.php. We put these files in a folder in wp-content/plugins, and activate it in the WP admin. We've also set up the class & named our command ourport.

We've created the subcommand hello, to show how to use arguments passed in from the command line.

Since we're importing from a second database, we need to create a new database connection. My preference is to create a setup function that populates a member variable, which is what this step does. We also create a new subcommand test to make sure we've connected.

In this step we've created three new functions, but only one of them is a subcommand. Any public method of your class will be a subcommand, you need to specify private if it's just a utility. So we've created the subcommand update which requires an ID, and pulls that one post out of our source database. Then we run it through _import. Read through these functions - the important parts are wp_insert_post, update_post_meta. set_post_format can also be a useful function, and checking out the functions related to wp_insert_post would also be smart.

At this point you can run wp ourport update <id> and you'll see your new post!

Here (starting at line 100), we pull out tags and categories from the source database. Tags can be inserted directly as text, so we don't need to change the $terms result except to manipulate it into the correct format for wp_set_post_terms. Categories need to be the term_id, so we do an array_walk to convert each category to a WordPress category ID (note: this function is not actually written, but you would use term_exists to get the term ID if it exists, and if not you can create it with wp_insert_term). Important functions here are wp_set_post_terms and wp_list_pluck.

By now we've tried the import and can see it imports a post, but maybe we also need the media moved into the media library. To do this, we'll use a regular expression to grab all the <img> tags & pull out the URL. From here we do a little checking to make sure we want to import it, and then using media_sideload_image, we download the image, and move it into the library. This returns HTML of the image tag, so using the original $img we saved, we simply string-replace the old HTML with the new. Now that we've changed the content, we need to update the post with wp_update_post.

The important functions here are media_sideload_image & wp_update_post.

Create a new subcommand to grab all items from the database. While there are items, we'll grab an item and run import on it, just like we do in the single post step. You can pass arguments here to skip certain posts (maybe you have a list of IDs already imported).

• WP-CLI- see here for install instructions & basic use.
• All the codex pages linked
• WP-CLI's Commands Cookbook
• $wpdb documentation for reference on the WP database