Better WordPress Development Workflow with WordPlate – SitePoint

Composer is a fantastic tool that is widely used in modern PHP development to handle your project dependencies. It helps to install and update all related packages or dependencies of your project. Although it is not primarily used in WordPress core yet, as developers we can still take advantage of Composer to bootstrap our WordPress applications.

For references and documentation on using Composer alongside WordPress, I cannot recommend highly enough Rarst’s Composer site. It is a great resource to learn how Composer can be integrated to WordPress in many different ways. Recently, there has also been a few projects that aim to simplify the WordPress setup using Composer such as WP Starter and WordPlate.

According to the official WordPlate website, WordPlate is described as a:

WordPress framework built with Laravel and Symfony components. With a familiar setup for every Laravel enthusiast. Following the don’t repeat yourself principle.

WordPlate is a WordPress boilerplate that takes the idea of managing your WordPress site completely with Composer, and eases up various parts of the development with popular packages from Packagist such as PHP dotenv and Symfony components. The rest of the article will focus on WordPlate, specifically the latest release version of 3.1.0 at the time of writing.

This tutorial assumes that you have a working web server, either locally or remotely with SSH access to use the command line. You are also expected to be comfortable working on command line to follow the tutorial.

Prerequisites

WordPlate requires at least PHP version 5.5.9 with mbstring extension, so for older PHP installation, an update is required. To check on your installed PHP version, simply run the command:

php -v

and it will show whatever version of PHP you currently have.

There are also few other things that need to be installed beforehand which are:

• Composer
• Node.js and gulp.js

Installing Composer

To install Composer on Linux or Unix system, simply type the command

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

The second line is optional, so that you can simply reference composer in your terminal instead of php composer.phar when using Composer. For other systems, please refer to Composer documentation.

To verify you have installed Composer correctly, type in this command in your terminal, and you should be able to see the installed version of Composer with all available commands.

composer -v

Installing Node.js and gulp.js

Node.js can be downloaded, or installed from the source code depending on your operating system by visiting the Node.js download page while gulp.js can be installed by simply running this command:

npm install --global gulp

npm should be available to use once you have Node.js successfully installed. You can find more info on installing gulp.js on their documentation page.

Now, typing in node .......