At my current job, @NetRelations, I was hired as a PHP/Wordpress developer (and front end dev). So naturally I do WordPress stuff, but working with WP can sometimes feel… Well *sigh*, because of the way the code in the popular, fantastic cms. That is why things like Themosis are so fantastic.

As a fan, user, supporter and Artisan of the great PHP-framewoerk Laravel , Themosis is like a warm, cozy blanket over WordPress! And we are purely talking code now, not the application it self. Themosis implements many features and ideas from Laravel, modern PHP and staying true to everything WordPress.
But this is not an intro to Themosis, this post is about getting more Laravel magic to your WordPress/Themosis setup.

Because yes, there are some things “missing” if you will. At least of your used to building sites and apps with Laravel. So lets get to it and implementing support for using Eloquent.

First we need to add Eloquent to our composer.json file in our root folder. So open your terminal and in your root run.

composer require illuminate/database

You should now see it in your composer file in the “require” object. Now comes the part which I’m not really sure what is the best way or best place to put it. That is loading of Eloquent and handing your database settings to it. I chose to put inside environments config files, so for my local installation I put the following code in side “config/environments/local.php”.

use Illuminate\Database\Capsule\Manager as Capsule;

$capsule = new Capsule;

$capsule->addConnection([
    'driver'    => 'mysql',
    'host'      => getenv('DB_HOST'),
    'database'  => getenv('DB_NAME'),
    'username'  => getenv('DB_USER'),
    'password'  => getenv('DB_PASSWORD'),
    'charset'   => 'utf8',
    'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
    'prefix'    => ''
]);

$capsule->setAsGlobal();
$capsule->bootEloquent();

What are the getenv() things in that code. Well if you use Themosis or open the file I mentioned, you will see that they are used for the WordPress database settings. So you can just reuse those code parts.
One little disclaimer here right up front. You cannot remove the WP db-settings, as far as I know because WordPress needs a its database connection.

We have Eloquent added, installed and booted – now what?

Now we can just create our models and make them extend Eloquent, like this.

<?php
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model as Eloquent;

class PostModel extends Eloquent{

	protected $table = 'wp_posts';
	protected $primaryKey = 'ID';

}

Then in your controller you could do something like

public function allPosts(){
  $allposts = PostModel::all();

  return $allposts;
}

Not the most beautiful code but you get the gist.

So yeah that was basically it for adding Eloquent to your Themosis based WordPress installation! 🙂
But wait, just one more thing 😉

This last tip is something I’m going to try to make time to make a pull request for and implemented into Themosis.
So what I wanted when I added Eloquent to my project was to use the relationship features of it. At first I didn’t really get them to work as Eloquent (or what not) couldn’t figure what model I was referencing. But after a few minutes I figured I’d try something that I had tried earlier for another reason but failed. You see to be able to use your controllers and models in Themosis you have to ad them to an config file which in turn loads them in your app. Easy enough but a bit cumbersome, *cough* when your used to autoloading a la PSR4 *cough*.

Said and done, opened my composer.json and added a PSR-4 section to the autoload object and pointed it to my “theme/app” folder, like so.

[json]
“autoload”: {
“psr-0”: {
“Thms”: “library”
},
“psr-4”: {
“MyTheme\\”: “htdocs/content/themes/my-theme/app”
}
},
[/json]

Now you just need to add a namespace declaration to your models, and use the complete path when adding a relation.

<?php namespace MyTheme\models
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model as Eloquent;

class PostModel extends Eloquent{

	protected $table = 'wp_posts';
	protected $primaryKey = 'ID';

   public function tags() {
   /* Given that the related models name is TagModel */
      return $this->hasMany('MyTheme\Models\TagModel');
   }

}

As simple as that, don’t you think. And as a bonus, you don’t need to define your models in the “loading.config.php” file anymore as they are autoloaded. at least I don’t think you do, works for me so far.
Same should apply for your controllers, just don’t forget to put in the namespace declaration and “use” the files you, well use inside your class!

That is all for now. Comments, suggestions and improvements on the above is welcome.