Rocks 🤘

• It’s popular!
• It’s got comprehensive and well-maintained documentation
• Erm… it’s popular?

Sucks 💩

• Clunky DX
• Composer? PSR-4? Anyone? Bueller?
• So… many… crap… plugins
• Global namespaces ftw
• jQuery!
• Also React, but probably not the style you’re used to
• How in Cthulhu’s name do I use a frontend build tool?

Sucks 💩

• Bad procedural patterns
• Weird antiquated php 4 syntax
• Inconsistent and unmaintainable spaghetti awfulness
• “Template” soup - ok, boomer
• Almost everything is globally scoped. Good luck with that
• Functions with dozens of parameters.
• functions.php with thousands of lines and meaningless function names
• Like, really hard to test

Sucks 💩

• Types? Never heard of them.
• Or maybe they exist, but they are wrong.
• Or maybe they are correct, but they make no sense
• Or they are all “mixed” and therefore useless
• Side effects everywhere - echo everything most of the time, but sometimes not. You have to guess, because there is no reliable typing so static analysis won’t help you.
• No dependency injection
• Hooks, filters and actions - a mess of race conditions
• And don’t even get us started on the loop, which is just… wat?

Because clients like WordPress 🫂

• They know it
• Its ubiquity and familiarity makes it the de facto CMS.
• It’s not just popular, it’s extremely popular, a veritable behemoth. It powers half the internet. And yes that goes for enterprise level customers too.
• No one cares about your cool framework, just ship it already

Budget 💸

• A flexible ready made admin system. Yes you could build one out in e.g. Orchid or Sonata or whatever and it’s going to be way nicer and more bespoke, but it’s going to take you longer at least initially and you still won’t have feature parity.
• Also those crappy plugins we’ve mentioned actually make it super quick to get features out the door. Online shop? No problem, here’s WooCommerce. Admin fields? Sure, ACF to the rescue. Frontend forms? Spin up Contact Form 7 or Formidable.

Legacy Projects 👴

• Maybe you inherited something.
• Maybe you built it before you knew any better.
• Yes, these projects have possibly outgrown the platform or shouldn’t have been built with WordPress in the first place, but they still need maintaining and refactoring and new features added, and face it, you’re never going to be doing that great big rebuild in the sky.

But… you can still have nice things 🥂

• You can get all the maintainable patterns and friendly DX you’re used to from saner frameworks.
• Routing, models, PSR-7/PSR-15 Request/Response, Job Queues, view templates, DI Container, ORM, DB Migrations, the lot…
• In fact, there is a whole thriving open source ecosystem around this concept.

The ecosystem 🌍

• WPackagist

• Frameworks

And our very own contender… Forme

WPackagist 📦

• A packagist repository that mirrors all publicly available plugins and themes.
• composer require and off you go.
• For private PHP repos, we use Satis.

Frameworks 🏗️

Will provide at the very least:

• A project installation boilerplate
• Composer & PSR-4
• .env alongside or instead of wp-config
• Database Migrations
• DI Container
• Custom Routing & HTTP Middleware Stack
• Models - usually Eloquent at least abstracting base WordPress Posts/Pages and Users, but also Custom Posts, Meta, Menus, Shortcodes, etc.
• View templating - Blade, Twig, or Plates
• Controllers plus views instead of "templates"
• Frontend build tools (e.g., Webpack/Vite) and some way of referencing built frontend assets

Frameworks 🏗️

Some also offer:

• Nicer patterns for dealing with WP entities and concepts
• Code generation & dev tools
• Job Queues
• Deployment frontend build system via e.g., lerna.js
• Testing setup (e.g., Pest + BrainMonkey)
• A way to package your plugin or theme for the WP directory

Try them out 🧪

• https://formewp.github.io/ (Looking for contributors!)
• https://lumberjack.rareloop.com/
• https://framework.themosis.com/
• https://typerocket.com/