Allow us to introduce Mantle, a framework for building robust websites and applications using WordPress. Here at Alley, we love building content-focused websites using WordPress, the world’s leading open-source CMS. We also love building custom applications using Laravel, a powerful and feature-rich web application framework. Think of Mantle as a layer that sits between WordPress and your custom code, providing you all the benefits of the WordPress CMS with a developer experience similar to Laravel.
Mantle empowers developers to build complex sites more quickly and easily by bringing WordPress a powerful ORM, simple and flexible RESTful routing, blade templates, queues, factories and seeding, and a testing framework that’s so awesome, you’ll find it demonstrably faster and easier to build features by writing your tests first. And that’s just a taste of the candy.
Blah blah blah, words are boring, we know. Diving in head-first is easy:
composer global require alleyinteractive/mantle-installer mantle new my-sandbox
This will install Mantle for you in an existing WordPress installation, or it will install WordPress for you otherwise.
Mantle is most applicable when you’re building a new site from the ground up. If you want to try Mantle out on an existing site, you can add Mantle’s testing framework to your site to make unit and integration tests demonstrably faster, easier, and more enjoyable to write.
We hope you’ll give Mantle a try. Watch our introductory video and check out the documentation to learn more. Let us know what you think!
