The long-awaited 2.5.0 release of WP-CLI is coming out on Wednesday, May 19th, 2021. š
WP-CLI maintainer and core contributor Alain Schlesser explained the delay had several contributing causes. First, the pandemic reduced contributors. Then Travis CI dropped open source support. As a result, a lot of projects (including WP-CLI) migrated to GitHub Actions for testing and deployment.
Alain’s release notice mentions an end-of-year post by Juliette Reinders Folmer explaining the challenges facing maintainers in 2020. Juliette wrote about the “perfect storm” of obstacles facing open source code maintainers. āļø
Those impacted by Travis CI and also PHP 8 have faced a lot of challenges, which Juliette details at length. Of particular concern in the WordPress space:
… the barrier for updating legacy code to use a more modern PHP version has gone up exponentially and for some, may even have become insurmountable.
On the upside, it’s good to see a positive, well-funded release and WP-CLI continuing to move forward now. āļø
