Allow wp post term * to support Term IDs

[pkarjala]

Currently if you want to set the Terms associated with a Post via wp-cli, you have to use the Slug of the Term. This is somewhat cumbersome if there are a large number of Terms to set, and the ID of said Term is already known, as the Slug must be programmatically looked up and then the ID translated to that Slug.

Instead, allow the option of passing an array or list of Term IDs to the wp post term * command list.

See https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_set_post_terms for documentation on using IDs in wp_set_post_terms.

[danielbachhuber]

Thanks for the suggestion, @pkarjala.

Instead, allow the option of passing an array or list of Term IDs to the wp post term * command list.

Historically, the challenge with supporting both slugs and ids is that a term can have a numeric slug. As such, if I have a term with id 3 and a term with slug 3 and run wp post term add post_tag 3, WP-CLI couldn't know which term you meant without additional information.

Here are some prior threads:

• export --category=123 fails due to an is_int() check in term_exists() #894 (comment)
• wp term get should support term slug #2156 (comment)

Thoughts?

[pkarjala]

One option, as previously suggested, may be to set a flag that indicates ONLY usage of Term IDs versus Slugs. In that instance, the user MUST provide only numeric Term IDs; otherwise it is presumed that they are providing a Slug (which may also be a numeric string value).

I'm not familiar enough with other flag settings in the wp-cli project to know what existing standards are, but here are some suggestions:

wp post term <post_id> --term_ids=<array or comma separated list of term ids>
wp post term <post_id> <2, 3, 4, 5, 6> --term_ids=true

[danielbachhuber]

Do you think it's necessary to add this feature? How did you end up solving the problem in your case?

[pkarjala]

We used

$document_type = json_decode( shell_exec( "wp term list document_type --format=json --fields=term_id,name,slug" ) );

to pull a list of all Terms associated with a specific Taxonomy (document_type in this case), and their associated IDs and Slugs. We then process this in PHP to create a list of Slugs which we use for comparison against the existing list of Term IDs that we have from a spreadsheet. The Name is included to make sure we have the correct IDs and Slugs.

It would be more convenient and faster programmatically for us to be able to use the Term IDs directly instead of having to do a lookup comparison for each Term ID, but it is not strictly necessary.

[danielbachhuber]

This makes sense. I'm amenable to adding a --by=<type> argument that accepts either 'slug' or 'id' and the default is 'slug'.