Acorn – Use Laravel Inside WordPress

by rob • 2 years ago

60 30 2 years ago

acomjean• 2 years ago

I work on a website for a non-profit. We have a hybrid wordpress symfony site. We're always being pulled two ways, we like that we switched to wordpress for the more static parts of the site (CMS). We have some minor custom functionality thats being handled by symfony, that should righly be a wordpress plug in....

This might be the thing. Especially if you can use it for plug-ins.

pluc• 2 years ago

You'd just be switching one framework for another really. Either make it framework agnostic or make it use the framework you're already using (wordpress)... anything else is unnecessary overhead

rob2• 2 years ago

I'm not sure if this helps, but there's also Corcel — sort of the opposite of Acorn:

https://github.com/corcel/corcel

Corcel is a collection of PHP classes built on top of Eloquent ORM (from Laravel framework), that provides a fluent interface to connect and get data directly from a WordPress database.

AstroJetson• 2 years ago

We have a hybrid wordpress symfony site

I was trying to get it set up so I could use twig templates inside pages. I couldn't get it to work since both frameworks ( Wordpress & Symfony) want to be in charge. Any secrets you can impart?

charlie0• 2 years ago

Frankstein-ing frameworks like this is asking for trouble. This smells like something that was made by devs because they hated working on WP, not understanding that the reason why WP is picked if often due to political reasons, not technical ones.

I predict two forces will turn these kinds of projects into spaghetti: Actual devs working on resolving issues with code, less technical people fighting to use plugins and other add-ons to add functionality.

rob2• 2 years ago

This smells like something that was made by devs because they hated working on WP, not understanding that the reason why WP is picked if often due to political reasons, not technical ones.

Made by the roots.io team, who have been doing this since 2011:

https://roots.io/about/

Other projects in this space include:

https://roots.io/sage/

https://roots.io/bedrock/

Great projects!

jrgd• 2 years ago

I second this; have been using Roots “frameworks” for years now and cant state enough how great this is compared to wordpress-traditional-workflow.

It’s great.

newzisforsukas• 2 years ago

Laravel itself is a Frankenstein with Symfony, so...

solarkraft• 2 years ago

This smells like something that was made by devs because they hated working on WP, not understanding that the reason why WP is picked if often due to political reasons, not technical ones

But that’s the point? When WP is picked for political reasons, this is how you can make it nice on the technical side.

ochrist• 2 years ago

Oh no.

Acorn was - and is - the then famous Acorn Computers. Makers of the BBC computer and eventually the inventor of the ARM processor (first used in the Archimedes range of computers).

Please use another name (end of rant).

yurishimo• 2 years ago

This project is over 5 years old.

askonomm• 2 years ago

Unfortunately any PHP devloper worth their money knows that developing WP sites, even if you follow the WP's standard to the T, is a horrible experience riddled with anti patterns. But, to try to remedy that by duct-taping an entirely different framework on top doesn't, to me at least, make things any better. In fact, it makes it worse - now there's two frameworks to maintain.

abanana• 2 years ago

Especially if you follow the WP's standard to the T. Wordpress coding "standards" came from one person's idiosyncrasies, going against most other coding standards including (especially) the PSR ones. It's a while since I last looked at contributors' attempts to bring some sanity to it all, but the last I saw was that they kept getting knocked back by the gatekeepers.

stephenr3• 2 years ago

look you couldn't pay me any amount of money to work on Wordpress, but not cargo culting PSR like a bunch of others isn't the red flag you make it out to be.

I was dubious when they declared that projects indent method is somehow a barrier to "interoperability".

When they made a logging system based on strings because one existing implementation was written by a guy who apparently doesn't understand syslog levels, I gave up any expectation that they'd produce anything of value.

It's design by committee with the added bullshit of wanting to emulate Java.

thrownaway561• 2 years ago

Wordpress still didn't have an official style guide or components when I was developing in it which always irked me. Every plugin looked different and most times you would get jQuery conflicts if 2 plugins needed different versions. Also people not using namespaces and just throwing functions within the global namespace was a nightmare to debug. Don't get me wrong, WordPress has always been great at getting something up quick, but if you're going to be creating an app where you need a separate framework, I don't see why you would pickaxe into WordPress itself. Just create a separate app in your favorite framework of choice and use their API to interface with it. Their API is actually really good and easy to work with.

thinkingtoilet• 2 years ago

Believe it or not, some people don't have a choice on what they work on. I'm guessing the options weren't WP + Laravel or Rust.

diego_sandoval• 2 years ago

The question I've always had is: why hasn't anyone developed something with all the good things of Wordpress, but none of the bad ones. The good things mainly being:

- extensibility and flexibility.

- smooth learning curve at the beggining (when developing custom themes from scratch, compared to, for example, a "real" backend framework).

chamomeal• 2 years ago

I’m sure dozens of excellent replacements have been created, but WP is just so huge.

It doesn’t matter how messy it is, you’re not going to convince the marketing agency with 10 Wordpress devs to learn something else.

It’s probably also relevant that WP is so weird and different from other frameworks. A lot of people who make websites with WP don’t seem to know the first thing about web dev outside of the WP ecosystem. I’m not hating on them, but you can use WP in ways that don’t give you skills to use other tech.

kijin• 2 years ago

The extensibility, flexibility, and smooth learning curve for non-techies comes at a significant cost.

WordPress was designed to be extensible and flexible without requiring the user to edit source files or run commands in a shell. After all, both of these tasks are serious hurdles for non-techies just starting a blog. The user gets a cheap hosting account with a domain and WordPress pre-installed, and doesn't want to care about what's happening on the server side.

This precludes the use of composer, npm, or any other command-line tool in vogue, for installing and managing plugins, themes, and associated libraries. Plugin and theme developers, of course, can use a package manager to bring in their own libraries if they want. But this is not centrally managed by WordPress, so you often end up with incompatible versions and duplicate functionality.

This is also the reason why no program whose tutorial starts by running a shell command -- git, brew, composer, you name it -- is ever going to replace WordPress.

flessner• 2 years ago

Keep in mind that WordPress is over 20 years old at this point - the problem it was built to solve just isn't the same anymore.

Most of the use cases nowadays are covered by even easier products (social media, Medium, Linktree, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, Webflowly, ...)

So you'd consider WordPress for anything that requires something more advanced like login, storing user data, complex state, fully custom design, ... (or out of habit/experience of course). That seems to be within the possibilities for low-code/no-code tools - they aren't quite there yet in my opinion, but in a couple years they might be.

rpmisms2• 2 years ago

Statamic is what you're looking for.

Apofis• 2 years ago

I am horrified by this notion. There's no reason to not just build a CMS on Laravel if you actually have PHP developers on hand, even if you have one competent PHP dev on hand you they should be able to build a CMS on Laravel without issue. This whole concept doesn't make sense to me.

wizzzzzy• 2 years ago

Having used acorn (via roots sage) on a project recently I'd say on balance it does improve working with Wordpress. I wouldn't describe it as a nice experience though.

Acorn – Use Laravel Inside WordPress

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