I’ve been at WordCamp London for the last two days (An excellent event, you should definitely consider it if you’re into WordPress and are in – or can get to – the UK). There were a fair few talks about making the admin area of WordPress better by customising according to the site architecture.

This is something I’ve always been an advocate of – particular on sites that go beyond simple posts and pages. One of my plugins provides some of the tools that can help with this. The “Say What?” string replacement plugin for WordPress allows you to override strings from WordPress core and/or plugins that you’re using so you can personalise the phrases that are used to your particular use case.

I took the opportunity to make some small updates to the plugin over the last few days. Particularly I’ve extended the plugin to have support for WP-CLI. This allows you to import and export string replacements – particularly useful if you have a standard set (or sets) of replacements that you use on sites you build. You can also use it to get a list of all replacements you currently have set up on your site.

Generating a list of replacements

$ wp say-what list
+-----------+-------------+--------+--------------------+---------+
| string_id | orig_string | domain | replacement_string | context |
+-----------+-------------+--------+--------------------+---------+
| 3         | Tools       |        | Lee's tools        |         |
| 9         | Dashboard   |        | The dashboard      |         |
+-----------+-------------+--------+--------------------+---------+

Exporting your replacements

This will ‘export’ all of your replacements in CSV format to the file /tmp/my-replacements.csv. This file is in the same format you need for importing back into the site, or into another site.

$ wp say-what export --format=csv > /tmp/my-replacements.csv

Updating replacements

Sometimes you might want to export a set of replacements, edit them, and then re-import. You can do this with the ‘update’ command – this will update any items with a string_id provided, or insert any items without a string ID. The following command will read in the file /tmp/my-replacements-amended.csv and update the database.

$ wp say-what update /tmp/my-replacements-amended.csv

Importing replacements

If you just want to add the replacements in a file to the database, you can use the ‘import’ command. This will insert each item in the file as a new item in the database.

$ wp say-what import /tmp/my-replacements-new.csv

Trying it out?

You can grab the plugin from WordPress.org – or check it out on GitHub – thanks to WordCamp London for the inspiration!