Apply parameters that user create and post update silently discard

[swissspidy]

Draft. These are the two pre-existing bugs noticed while auditing field lists for wp-cli/wp-cli#5286, now with tests. Independent of #636 and #6392 — branched off main and reviewable on its own.

Same failure as #5286 reached from the other side: there the parameter name is wrong and the value is dropped, here the name is right and the value is dropped anyway. Both report success.

What's broken

Command	Parameter	Behaviour
user create	--user_nicename	documented, accepted, ignored
user create	--rich_editing	documented, accepted, ignored
post create	--post_modified, --post_modified_gmt	documented, accepted, ignored
post update	--post_modified, --post_modified_gmt	documented, accepted, ignored

User_Command::create() builds an explicit stdClass for wp_insert_user() and never sets either property. wp_insert_post() derives post_modified/post_modified_gmt itself and never reads them from $postarr — on update they are unconditionally current_time( 'mysql' ).

Note user create has no catch-all, so it is already strictly validated. It accepts these two parameters because they are documented, and then drops them.

Commits are test-first

b4355e0 adds the scenarios and fails. aeaa92b makes them pass. Reviewable in that order, and verified in that order with Behat by checking src/ out at each commit:

src/ at b4355e0 (tests only)   5 scenarios (2 passed, 3 failed)
src/ at aeaa92b (fix)          5 scenarios (5 passed)

The two that pass in both states are deliberate controls — nicename falling back to the login, and post_modified defaulting to now when not asked for. Without them a red run would not distinguish a real bug from a broken harness.

Full suites

Run on both database backends; the results are identical.

Suite	MySQL	SQLite
post.feature	22 scenarios, 22 passed	22 scenarios, 22 passed
post-create-duplicate.feature	5 scenarios, 5 passed	5 scenarios, 5 passed
user.feature	26 scenarios, 25 passed, 1 failed	26 scenarios, 25 passed, 1 failed

The one user.feature failure is pre-existing and unrelated. It is the multisite duplicate-email scenario, which expects Sorry, that email address is already used! while current core trunk returns This email address is already registered. Log in with this address or choose another one. Confirmed by re-running that scenario with src/ checked out at origin/main, where it fails identically. My diff does not touch it.

Tested against WordPress trunk (7.2-alpha), which is what this environment could obtain — worth noting since that is also the source of the message change above.

One regression this surfaced

Making post_modified live exposed a latent bug in post create --from-post. It copies the source post's fields and unsets post_date, post_date_gmt, guid and ID — but not post_modified. Harmless while core ignored it; with this change the duplicate would inherit the original's modification date instead of the current time. Fixed by unsetting it alongside post_date, with a scenario in post-create-duplicate.feature.

The design question

For post_modified the alternative is to remove the parameters from the docblocks rather than make them work. Smaller change, but it drops functionality the documentation has been advertising since it was added, and "set the modification date" is a reasonable thing to want from an admin tool. I went with making them work; inverting it is a small diff if you'd rather.

There is no such question for user create — those two are unambiguous.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_014SSZzqMJRDTiLiDxQEPYcL

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[codecov]

Codecov Report

❌ Patch coverage is 0% with 26 lines in your changes missing coverage. Please review.

Files with missing lines	Patch %	Lines
src/Post_Command.php	0.00%	24 Missing ⚠️
src/User_Command.php	0.00%	2 Missing ⚠️

📢 Thoughts on this report? Let us know!

[swissspidy]

For post_modified the alternative is to remove the parameters from the docblocks rather than make them work. Smaller change, but it drops functionality the documentation has been advertising since it was added, and "set the modification date" is a reasonable thing to want from an admin tool. I went with making them work; inverting it is a small diff if you'd rather.

@schlessera Any preference?