WordPress and Laravel

Published on January 18th, 2016 by Eric L. Barnes

WordPress is one of the most popular open source applications and that means many people are comfortable using its admin to manage their site. There are times when building out a site this is advantageous as it prevents you from having to retrain the user on how to manage content, menus, photos, and more. A popular way of setting up a site like this is to use WordPress as the admin and then build out the front end in a framework such as Laravel.

In fact, I did this very thing here on Laravel News and you can take a look at how to use WordPress as a backend for a Laravel here. I used the WP-API and built my own importer but if you’d like to see some off the shelf solutions take a look at the following packages:

WordPress Corcel

Corcel uses Laravel Eloquent models to manage retrieving content directly from your WordPress database. Once installed you can use the same comfortable syntax you are used to:

// All published posts
$posts = Post::published()->get();
$posts = Post::status('publish')->get();
 
// A specific post
$post = Post::find(31);

It includes support for posts, post types, taxonomies, pages, categories, and attachments. The one downside is the package is still under development.

WordPressToLaravel

WordPressToLaravel syncs data from a wordpress*.com* blog. It’s designed to run as a scheduled cron job through Laravel Scheduler. Then it will automatically download and import post data into your local database.

Once setup you will be responsible for building out your own models, controllers, and views to integrate with your database, and some advantages to utilizing the wordpress.com system is they automatically handle WordPress upgrades, assets CDN, and content can be added through the website, mobile app, or desktop app.

The drawback to this package is it is limited to just post data, it doesn’t support categories or tags.

WP Eloquent

WP Eloquent is a package that creates a wrapper for WordPress database tables. It includes models for Posts, Comments, Post Meta, User, and User Meta. Once installed here is an example of it’s usage:

use WeDevsORMWPPost as Post;
Post::type('page')->get()
Post::status('publish')->get()
Post::type('page')->status('publish')->get()

WP Eloquent also works with the Laravel DebugBar and doesn’t create any extra database connections.

laravel-wp-api

laravel-wp-api integrates directly with the WordPress JSON REST API for self hosted sites.

After installing you have access to a WpApi alias which makes it easy to query for data:

$post = WpApi::post($slug);
$catPosts = WpApi::category_posts($slug, $page);

Other Methods of Integrating WordPress and Laravel

Of course, the three packages above aren’t the only ways of integrated the two. Here is a collection of tutorials for integrating manually:

WordPlate is built on top of Laravel and Symfony components and utilizes WordPress as its dependency through PHP Composer.
Using WordPress with Lumen
Setting up a Laravel API with a WordPress backend (includes example Eloquent trait)
Using Laravel 4 + Eloquent With WordPress

As you can see there are a number of ways of integrating WordPress and Laravel and depending on your goals I’m sure you can find an existing package or tutorial to help you implement the two systems together.