Add Featured Images to Old Posts Using “Set Post Thumbs” for WP-CLI

Hey y’all! While I’ve admittedly been delaying my series about rethinking PHP development in WordPress first because of this global pandemic and all the election nonsense, and now more recently because of sheer procrastination because I’m not entirely sure how to start it, I wanted to take a minute to let you know that I made a thing!

Early this year, I got together with my buddy and former bandmate, Matt Semke, to talk about his website, Cats Will Eat You. For a number of years that I’m sure I should know by now and will surely get wrong (14, I think?), Matt has been publishing new art on his website every single day. But, even though his site was getting a lot of love content-wise, it wasn’t getting much attention from a web development and maintenance standpoint.

Matt and I got together over a couple of beers to talk about updating his website from WordPress 3.4(!) to the latest version, getting him onto a better hosting plan, and brainstorming some ideas about how to improve his site overall and make it better for both him and his visitors. This is one of my favorite (and only, at the moment!) freelance projects for a couple reasons: it means I get to help out a good friend who makes cool art, and it’s a low-impact obligation on my time, because I pretty much check in on it periodically and work on it when I have the interest and energy.

That said, there’s one other cool thing I love about this project: it gives me the opportunity to generalize stuff I work on specifically for Matt, and open-source the reusable bits. This weekend is the first such instance of that.

The Problem

With over 14 years of every-day art, Matt’s got thousands of posts on his site. He’s been using WordPress for a very long time; so long, in fact, that the content on his site predates the existence of features we take for granted today, like custom post types, featured images, the REST API, and so on.

In reviewing his theme over the weekend, I realized that I wanted to move some of his data around, get rid of some of the cruft, and, most importantly, set a featured image on each of his posts. So, I spent some time working on a solution, and then as I realized, “hey, some other folks might like this, too”, I started extracting out the parts that weren’t specific to his site, but to anyone’s. And then I made a repo. And then I connected that repo to Packagist. And then I learned how to make it installable using WP-CLI, because even after all this time, I’ve still never done that.

The Solution: Set Post Thumbs

In short, you can now do these two things:

1. Run wp package install jmichaelward/set-post-thumbs from the command line of your WordPress project.
2. Run wp thumbnail set --all, and WordPress will query all of the posts on your site that do not have a featured image, and then check whether there are images in your post. If there are, it’ll attach the first one.

The utility comes with a couple of additional commands to report back on which posts had more than one images, and which posts couldn’t set a featured image because it didn’t have any. And then you can run a cleanup command at the end to clear out all the excess meta.

It’s a little thing. It does a fairly specific task, and not everyone might need it. Additionally, I’ve tried to set it up so that it’s extensible, so that you can make modifications to the default way the tool works, in case your featured image lookup requirements differ.

What I really enjoyed about working on this is that I could take something I was building for a friend and open-source it to the broader community. Drop me a line if you wind up trying it and if you have any questions or run into any issues. I recommend using it only on a development environment where you have the opportunity to review the changes you’ve made. But, if you’ve got a site that has lots of posts without featured images, and you need a way to attach something to those posts, this should do the job for you.