WP-CLI for Advanced Custom Fields

This extension for Advanced Custom Fields that makes it possible to manage your field-groups through the console of wp-cli. The goal of this project is to make life easier for developers who working on Wordpress projects that use Advanced Custom Fields and love the WP-CLI command line tools.

Reasons to start this project

• Advanced custom fields did not interface with WP-CLI
• Sharing field-groups through XML or PHP code caused problems with differences between development, test, staging and production enviroments when shared with XML.
• No direct SVN or GIT support without manually putting the exported PHP or XML into a versioned directory.
• Naming convention for XML files was always the same, resulting in renaming hassle.
• Only using the generated field-groups on runtime through PHP code in functions.php disables the editing mode (which is an awesome UI that we require). So importing should be possible.

Requirements

• Advanced Custom Fields plugin
• wp-cli http://wp-cli.org/

Commands

This project adds the acf command to wp-cli with the following subcommands:

• wp acf: Default test and prints the help overview.

• wp acf status: provides a list of found field-groups in the current database of your Wordpress project.

• wp acf export:

  • creates a field-group directory into your current theme's directory.
  • creates a directory with the field-group name for each fieldgroup.
  • creates a data.php and data.xml for each field-group inside their respective folders.
  • creates a uniqid file that contains the id used by ACF to identify the field
  • use wp acf export all to export everything without prompting

• wp acf import: imports the XML(s) from active-theme/field-groups/{field-group_name}/data.xml`

  • When using wp acf import a selection menu apears to choose which field-group to import

• wp acf clean: cleans up the database from all found ACF post types and their coupled post_meta values, use this after you've edited the field-groups in the UI and used export to generate the new data.php files. Watch out: cannot be undone.

How to use

1. install wp-cli http://wp-cli.org/
2. clone this repo as advanced-custom-fields-wpcli in your plugins directory
3. activate advanced-custom-fields-wpcli plugin through "wp plugin activate advanced-custom-fields-wpcli" (or activate in the plugin menu)
4. open a terminal and go to your wordpress directory
5. type wp (and see the acf commands if installed correctly)
6. type wp acf to test the acf-wpcli extension
7. start using the commands as explained in "Commands"

When the plugin is enabled, any exported field groups found on the filesystem in your theme's field-groups folder will be added to Wordpress at runtime.

TODOs

• make acf-wpcli extension update-proof
• clean up code and refractor
• add more comments and versioning
• try to fix the wp-importer problem that caused the use of copied code from wp-importer plugin
• release this plugin as official WordPress plugin