How laziness can improve your workflow? Automating processes in WordPress

While laziness may seem like a hindrance, lazy developers actually bring immense value to any project. They are always looking for ways to avoid doing repetitive, menial tasks which lead to creative automated solutions, which then improve team efficiency and save time in the long run. I'll show you how laziness can boost your productivity and allow you to focus on things that matter while building WordPress solutions.

Use Cases

What are typical tasks in my WordPress workflow that are boring and really repetitive for me which I try to automate? Be aware that those scripts are created based on my workflow, so check them carefuly and adjust to your needs if you want to use them.

Tools

There are many possibilities to automate tasks in WordPress depending on yor personal workflow. I'll show you two tools without which I cannot imagine this type of work.

Bash

The easiest way for me is creating simple scripts using Bash. It is a command-line shell and scripting language for Unix systems, used to interact with the them by entering commands and executing scripts.

So I create them using simple and easy-to-read pattern that allows me to fire different tasks just by passing their names as parameters. It reads .env file so all project variables are also avaliable there. Maybe that’s nothing fancy but it works nice.

#!/bin/bash

# Read and inject variables from .env file
if [[ ! -f "./.env" ]]; then
  echo "Missing .env file."
else
  export $(grep -v '^#' .env | xargs)
fi

# Define specic tasks
function task() {
  echo "Performing task #1..."
}

# Switch statement that fires specific function from parameter
case $1 in
  "task")
    task
    ;;
esac

To perform the operations in the task function I just need to use wp.sh script and pass task name as parameter: ./wp.sh task.

WP CLI

WP-CLI is a must-have for automating things in WordPress. It's a command-line tool that allows to manage WordPress using a terminal. It can perform many types of tasks, such as updating plugins and themes, creating new posts and pages, managing users and many many more.

Notes

If you want to use full version of the script analyzed in this example, feel free to check out GitHub or just use the command below to download it and make executable. Enjoy!

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/przemekhernik/templates/main/bash/wp.sh -o wp.sh && chmod 744 wp.sh