Command-Line Interface [Web] 2.0

2007-02-22 23:04:15 by mcfarland in (6 comments) permalink

It’s out there and humping your leg, baby. Grab it while it’s fresh at themes.wordpress.net. The demo there is boned, so if you’re not enjoying it at this very moment, try it here.

Here’s what I wrote about what’s new:

CLI 2 is a complete rewrite. CLI 1 was “AJAX-ey”, CLI2 is real AJAX — it uses XML to transfer information from server to client. This allows for such things as tab-completion and context-sensitive interaction. Bash-type control keys are supported (^A, ^E, ^C, ^L). To work around the browser’s snarfing of some control-key combinations, there is a “sticky keys” approach for CTRL and ALT.

There is paging (long screens will pause with a “–MORE–” prompt).

There is a “filesystem” with subdirectories for each blog author and category, navigable with “cd”, “pwd” and “ls”. There are command switches, so “ls -R” works. “Help” takes an argument, so you can say “help command” to get help on a particular command.

Support for custom commands is improved, just drop your code into usr/bin.

For the SE people: The theme will allow search engine indexing (CLI 1 made heavy use of Javascript links). CLI 2 provides a subtle <A> link to a list of all articles.

There is a control panel, with some convenient presets for C64, VIC 20, ZX81, VT, Amber, and Paperwhite displays; or for the owner to create their own colour schemes.

Image processing is much improved and respects the colour scheme. A new command is provided for resetting the image cache from the command line.

That’s about all I can think of at the moment, but I’m sure I’ve left a lot out. It’s been a bit of a labour of love. Probably enhancing it any more will be akin to actually implementing the Bourne shell in PHP (rather than just simulating it).

If you have CLI 1, I totally recommend upgrading. There were a few amateurish mistakes in CLI 1 that have been fixed in CLI 2.

Version-wise, it was developed with PHP 5.1.6, MySQL 5.0.24, Apache 2.0.55, and WordPress 2.1 / 2.1.1. I’m pretty sure there’s some wiggle room on most of that, but there is some kind of funkiness about object references that’s making the filesystem not work on at least PHP 4.3.11. It also works on WP-MU 1.0. Also you need ImageMagick if you want the groovy image processing. Good luck if you want to run it on a Windows server (but since this theme is a love letter to UNIX-like systems, that would be some kind of a crime).

And an update to all that: I rewrote the “filesystem” for PHP 4.

Edit: Updated to work with WP 1.5.

Edit edit if you want to link to the groovy CLI theme, use “?wptheme=CLI” in the link. Or grab this link.