About Modern WordPress Website

Modern WordPress Website (MWW) is a modern way of building WordPress websites. Simple and powerful, it's a great skeleton to bootstrap a new WordPress project.

Think of it as a functions.php with an OOP architecture similar to Laravel.

First, you route WordPress conditional tags such as is_front_page() to Controllers, then you fetch/manipulate data and render a view with the data. With MWW, you don't use a theme. However, like in functions.php, you have access to all WordPress functions and plugins.

• MVC in WordPress.
• Modern, yet simple PHP.
• PSR-4 Autoloading.
• Dependency Injection Container (Thanks Luca Tume, for di52)
• Acceptance, Functional, Integration and Unit tests (Thanks Luca Tume, for wp-browser)
• Installs as a mu-plugin
• MWW is in BETA state.

Modern WordPress Website (MWW) is great for experienced PHP developers using WordPress, and for intermediate developers who want to take their skills to the next level.

MWW is in beta and open to contributors. Help us test and develop it!

Building a Small Project

(Click to watch on YouTube)

Installation

Modern WordPress Website is installed as a mu-plugin. This way we intercept WordPress requests at an earlier stage and have more control over the application.

To get started, simply follow these steps in a clean WordPress installation:

• Run git clone https://github.com/Luc45/ModernWordPressWebsite wp-content/mu-plugins in the root folder of a clean WordPress installation
• Run composer update in wp-content/mu-plugins/mww/
• (Recommended) You will not need your theme anymore, you can create an empty theme with just index.php, style.css and functions.php. Download empty theme.
• (Recommended) Set up tests by editing .env.example and renaming it to .env - Run tests with vendor/bin/codecept run

Now it's up to you to create awesome stuff!

How it works

Even though MWW is powerful, it's also very simple. It all starts with the routes:

// routes/app.php
use App/Controller/Pages/Home_Controller;

Route::add( 'is_front_page', [ Home_Controller::class, 'index' ] );

If is_front_page() is true, then call the method index() of App/Controller/Pages/Home_Controller:

// app/Controller/Pages/Home_Controller.php
namespace App/Controller/Pages;

class Home_Controller extends Controller {

    public function index() {
        $this->render('pages.home');
    }
    
}

Now all you need is a view!

// views/pages/home.blade.php
@extends('layouts.main')

@section('content')
    I am the homepage!
@endsection

That's all we need to get started!

MWW follows the Convention-over-Configuration (CoC) philosophy, which aims to make your code cleaner and smarter if you want to use the sensible defaults it provides. For instance, on the example above, you could also register your route like this: Route::add( 'is_front_page', Home_Controller::class );

If you pass just a class name to a Route, it will try to call index() on it by default.

Of course that modern applications uses a lot of dynamic data, not only static views. Here's how we can show Posts on the Home page:

class Home_Controller extends Controller {

    public function index() {
        $this->render( 'pages.home', [
            'posts' => get_posts()
        ] );
    }
    
}

Then, we have a variable $posts in our home view with the content of get_posts():

// views/pages/home.blade.php
<?php foreach ( $posts as $post ): ?>
    <a href="<?= esc_url( get_the_permalink($post->ID) ) ?>"><?= esc_html( $post->post_title ) ?></a>
<?php endforeach; ?>
<?php if (empty($posts)): ?>
   No posts to show
<?php endif; ?>

Since this is a Blade template, this would also work:

// views/pages/home.blade.php
@forelse ( $posts as $post )
    <a href=" {{ esc_url( get_the_permalink($post->ID) ) }} ">{{ esc_html($post->post_title) }}</a>
@empty
    No posts to show
@endforelse

What if we want to show a Single post, now?

Well, it's easy as 123:

// 1: Register the route
Route::add( 'is_single', Post_Controller::class );

// 2: Create the Controller
class Post_Controller extends Controller {
    public function index() {
        $this->render('pages.post');
    }
}

// 3: Create the View. You don't need to pass the post to it
//    because WordPress globals are always available in the views.
//    You can even use the special @loop directive to loop through
//    the current query, similar to while (has_post()): the_post();
//    in a regular WordPress context.
@extends('layouts.main')

@section('content')
    @loop
        <h1 class="post-title">
            {!! esc_html(get_the_title()) !!}
        </h1>
    @endloop
@endsection

You see? This is MVC. We could easily separate the logic - we don't need to use get_posts() in our view, we can do it in the Controller, or better yet, ask a Model to fetch and prepare that data, and then we pass it to the view. This way, it is easier for our application to grow organized.

Contributing

To contribute to Modern WordPress Website, you can open an issue with your suggestion and if approved, do a pull-request. Please follow PSR-2 code-styling standards and remind about the unopiniated and simple philosophy of Modern WordPress Theme.

To-dos

• Throw custom Exceptions throughout the framework and app
• Implement Service Providers
• Write more tests

License

The Modern WordPress Website is licensed under the MIT license.