Recently I came across this post on WP Tavern about a new framework for WordPress – Themosis that got me very excited. I couldn’t wait to find out more and instantly headed over to the site and the project on Github to find out more and have a play.
Themosis is an object-orientated framework for developers that allows them to build WordPress themes and sites in a faster, efficient, and more modern way. It is not a framework in the traditional sense, but essentially a plugin that adds an MVC layer on top of WordPress, giving themes the power of routing and a templating engine in the form of Scout. Scout is actually a fork of the Blade templating engine provided with Laravel, the popular modern PHP framework of the minute. Scout is not the only similarity with Laravel. Its routing syntax, folder structure and MVC base are all Laravel-esque.
It is these similarities that have sparked my interest in Themosis. Outside of WordPress development I have used CodeIgniter and Symfony2 for PHP built web applications, but I have been trying to learn and migrate myself over to Laravel for some time now. Having synergies with Laravel in my WordPress development I believe will help further my usage of Laravel itself.
But that is not the main reason why I am excited about Themosis. For the last year I have been using a bespoke object-orientated framework from the guys over at Outlandish for the majority of WordPress builds, and it has really proven to me the benefits of using such a framework. A framework improves speed of development by streamlining the code needed for repetitive tasks. It adds a uniform approach to code management, benefiting the team development model. Themosis goes that step further than my current framework with its templating engine, that will almost certainly speed up development further.
Whilst Julien Lambé, the developer behind Themosis, is working hard on version 1.0, the beta release is available on GitHub to explore and get to grips with, although you are advised to wait for 1.0 for production use. There is also extensive documentation already and a demo beta bookstore project to investigate.
Although Themosis is new and very much in its infancy, it is exciting to see how far along it is already, and I can’t wait to get started with 1.0. If you are interested in using an MVC approach in your WordPress site development, or want to improve on existing practices then I recommend you give Themosis a look.
What are your thoughts on using a framework on top of WordPress? What frameworks do you use currently?
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