This, a work-in-progress, is a list of good tools for WordPress developers.
Plugins
Query Monitor by John Blackbourn. Monitors pretty much everything that happens on WordPress page views, not just queries.
WP Rollback by GiveWP.com. Reinstalls previous versions of themes or plugins.
Demo Press by Milan Petrovic. Generates fake content and can create many posts, users, and other types of data.
Crontrol by John Blackbourn and others. Allows viewing and editing WP-Cron entries.
WL-CLI commands
The dist-archive package creates the zip file for a plugin, honoring a .distignore file. It looks for the plugin’s version in the top-level php file in the top-level docblock. (That is, in a comment block that looks like /** ... Version: 1.2.3 ... */. Delete any existing zip file for the plugin first. Run it like this
wp dist-archive .
The i18n package does useful things for internationalization and localization. Make a .pot translation-support file like this:
wp i18n make-pot . languages/plugin-name.pot --path=/var/www/wordpress-install-path
You can change the administrator password on a site with
wp user update 1 --user_pass=xyzzy
Jeff Gould’s article WP-CLI Packages We Can’t Live Without shows a few more useful packages. So does Mike Davey’s article WP-CLI Packages: Supercharge Your WordPress Development. Here are a couple.
wp doc looks up documentation from the WordPress code base.
wp package install alleyinteractive/wp-doc-command
wp doc is_admin
wp dbsnap takes a snapshot of the database, and wp dbunsnap restores it.
Github Workflows (Actions) for deployment
WordPress Plugin Deploy is a workflow to deploy Github Releases to the WordPress.org plugin repository. WordPress Plugin Asset Update is a workflow to update the “assets” (readme.txt and the screenshots) without releasing a new plugin version to the repository. These workflows automate the WordPress Subversion repository operations necessary to publish plugins to the public plugin directory.
Searching for plugins and themes that use a feature
Looking for themes and plugins that use a particular hook, function call, or other WordPress code feature? https://wpdirectory.net/ searches the WordPress.org repositories used to put plugins and themes into the public directory.
Debugging using http and local domains
The Gutenberg editor’s use of the REST API throws lots of CORS exceptions if you try to debug via http hitting locally defined domains. You can tell Chromium to disable this security feature. Visit chrome://flags/#block-insecure-private-network-requests and disable the feature.
System tools
Install this stuff:
sudo apt install build-essential
sudo apt install linux-tools-common linux-tools-generic linux-tools-`uname -r`
You can use performance monitor tool with
sudo perf top