Introduction to Laravel

(for WordPress developers)

Slides: bit.ly/2CseAwi

About Me

• I live in Austin with my wife Emily and our cat Banana
   
• I'm a web developer at ReviewPush (mainly using Laravel)

• I previously worked primarily with WordPress - theme & plugin development
   
• I enjoy travel, hiking, board games, good food, coffee, and craft beer
   
• Pretty much everywhere as @dabernathy89

Shameless Plug

Longhorn PHP Conference

Austin, TX

April 19th - 21st, 2018

longhornphp.com

Talk Overview

• Framework vs content management system
• Comparison of concepts & architecture
• Sample Laravel application

Framework

• A collection of utilities, usually unified by a defined architecture
• Comes with few to zero user-facing features
• Various methods of extension - packages & service providers in Laravel
• Virtually unlimited flexibility
• Built for developers only

CMS

• A complete application, ready to be used for managing content
• Often built on top of a framework (sometimes part of the CMS, as with WordPress or Joomla)
• Various methods of extension - themes & plugins in WordPress
• Limited flexibility
• Built for developers and/or end users

Framework

CMS

PHP Examples

Laravel Overview

• Created by Taylor Otwell in 2011
• Currently on version 5.5
• MVC-ish style architecture
• Contains a variety of features that can be used to build any kind of web application
• Additional libraries & tools exist in the Laravel ecosystem that aren't bundled with the framework

Laravel

• Simple apps tend to follow Model-View-Controller
• No strict architecture enforced
• Service Container assists with extending framework
• Allows for event-driven code

WordPress

• Event-driven: actions/filters are used both within core and to extend core
• See Tom McFarlin's post on MVC vs event-driven pattern

Architecture

Laravel

• Simple routing system maps URLs to corresponding logic (controller)
• After Laravel maps a URL to a controller, everything is up to the developer

WordPress

• WordPress converts a URL to a query & picks template
• Relies on rewrite rules: regular expressions, modified via filters
• See intro to this Roots.io blog post
• WordPress request diagram

Lifecycle

Laravel

• System for mapping Events to Listeners
• Events hold data; listeners act on Events
• Events can be `dispatched` from anywhere
• Events can easily be queued
• No equivalent of WordPress filters
• Available but not required

WordPress

• Hooks: actions and filters
• Actions trigger custom code and pass data
• Filters trigger custom code, pass data, and receive data back
• Synchronous
• Essential to WordPress development

Events vs Hooks

Laravel

• Entities typically represented by Eloquent Models
• Columns / properties entirely up to developer
• Models can have various relationships with other models
• Eloquent lets you easily query data, including related entities, and filter/paginate

WordPress

• Many entities are built-in to WordPress (users, posts, pages, menu items, images, etc)
• Custom entities tend to be Custom Post Types
• WP Query is used to easily query data and filter/paginate

Eloquent vs WP Query

Laravel

• Tool for building and processing simple to complex SQL queries
• Often used in conjunction with or instead of Eloquent
• Eloquent extends the Query Builder

WordPress

• Relatively simple class for running queries directly against database
• Developers encouraged to use WP Query instead when possible

Query Builder vs WPDB

Laravel

• Custom templating language similar to Twig, Mustache
• Data is generally fetched in controller and passed to template
• Developer determines which view (template) to load
• Highly modular
• Only has access to data passed to it
• Structured outside --> in

WordPress

• Plain PHP
• Data is generally fetched inside the template ("The Loop")
• WordPress determines which template will be loaded; can be altered via hooks
• Can be modular
• Global scope
• Structured top --> bottom

Blade vs Template System

Laravel

WordPress

Other Similar Features

Some Unique Laravel Features:

• Middleware
• Collections
• Validation
• Broadcasting (websockets)
• Queues
• Filesystem
• Migrations / Seeding

Some Unique WordPress Features:

• HTTP API
• Metadata / Options
• Settings API
• Menu System
• Media Library
• Widgets
• Various other CMS features

Sample Application: TodoMVC Back End

The TodoMVC project is a specification for a simple front-end application which can be written using various different JavaScript frameworks.

 

We're going to look at how we could use Laravel to handle persistence of TodoMVC data.

 

The back-end is simple: it needs to be able to create, read, update, and delete Tasks from the database.