WP CLI is moving under the umbrella of WordPress.org. Matt Mullenweg made the announcement, and in it says he’s also, “bringing together a number of companies in the WordPress ecosystem to solidify their financial support of runcommand so that Daniel and others can devote more time to making wp-cli better and better through 2017.”
Runcommand is Daniel’s commercial arm for WP CLI related projects. I spoke to Daniel about this shift, and how it relates to his recent fundraising efforts. Basically, it doesn’t change much from a practical standpoint, but it puts the significant weight of WordPress.org and Matt Mullenweg’s own commitment to WP CLI behind the project.
Runcommand will continue to be a source for what Daniel called “operational funding”, meaning companies and individuals can pay Runcommand, which will enable Daniel and other contractors to put efforts toward WP CLI.
Daniel had three primary priorities when choosing the path to go down:
- Identify what a sustainable future looks like for WP CLI
- Reduce his own “bus factor” (what happens if he dies or can no longer work on the project)
- Address the fact he can no longer voluntarily maintain WP CLI
He told me that, “given the options, this is the one with the potential for the best possible outcome.” Speaking to a number of other people about WP CLI — both folks who had contributed to his prior fundraising efforts, and some who had not — there was pretty universal agreement that this is a good move for the project.
Daniel will be able to do what he’s always done: make WP CLI awesome. But now he has official backing and there is a greater security for the future of the project that so many companies and developers utilize.
The new Make WordPress CLI blog is already up, and Daniel’s first post is an outline for migrating the website and GitHub repo to the official WordPress ones.
