Wordpress+Twig

A WordPress starter theme that utilizes MVC structure and Twig as its template engine.

Installation

The preferred method of installation is fork this repository, then install via Composer. In your WordPress project's composer.json, require WordPress+Twig:

"require": {
  "[your_username]/wptwig": "dev-master"
}

WordPress+Twig uses Composer Installers, which allows the theme to be installed in a location other than /vendor. Define this location as your WordPress themes folder:

"extra": {
  "installer-paths": {
    "public/wp-content/themes/{$name}/": ["type:wordpress-theme"]
  }
}

Usage

You can find basic usage in the starter theme's index.php file:

<?php
$page = new \wptwig\Controllers\Page($post);
$page->show();

A page controller is instantiated and the global $post object is passed in as the only argument. Then the controller's show() method is called, rendering the template.

Controller

The controller's job is to fetch data and display that data in a template. In src/Controllers/Page.php, two properties are defined:

public $modelName = "Page";
public $template = "page";

$modelName defines the name of the model the controller should instantiate, found in src/Models/{$modelName}.php. $template defines the name of the template the data should be rendered in, found in src/Views/{$template}.twig.

Additionally, the Page controller extends from the Base controller, which does several things:

Instantiates a model
Creates a Twig environment
Defines a show() method, which fetches data from the model and renders the data in the Twig template

Model

The model's job is to gather all the data needed for the view. Since the view will be out of the WordPress scope, we need to gather all data we need for the template in the model, which is still in the WordPress scope. For example, you cannot call functions like wp_header() and wp_footer() in a Twig template.

Each model needs at least a get() method, which returns an array of data to the controller for rendering. In src/Models/Page.php, you'll see there is a get() method, but right now, all it does is extend from its parent, which gathers data like the post, its metadata, site header, site footer, and body classes. See src/Models/base.php for more details.

If you want to gather more information for the Page view, do so in the Page model's get() method. For example, to get an array of tags associated with the page, you can modify get() to look like this:

<?php
public function get()
{
  $data = parent::get();

  // modify data for pages, if needed
  $data["tags"] = wp_get_post_tags($this->post->ID);

  return $data;
}

View