Pollora is in public beta

Many Laravel developers also ship WordPress sites. When they do, they leave their routes, their container and their Blade views behind, and find functions.php, scattered add_action() calls and global functions again. Pollora exists so they don’t have to choose. Today, its first public beta is available to everyone.

WordPress inside Laravel, not the other way round

Most bridges between the two run Laravel inside WordPress. Pollora takes the inverse route: Laravel’s front controller receives the request, and WordPress core loads during the boot of a service provider. The consequences are concrete:

• the front end is rendered by Laravel routing, controllers and Blade;
• the WordPress admin, database, block editor, plugins and REST API keep working as they always have;
• everything Laravel offers, from the container to queues and Eloquent, is available in a theme or a plugin.

A Laravel route can answer a WordPress page by its conditional tag, with the template hierarchy as a fallback:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;

Route::wp('single', function () {
    return view('post');
});

Registration code becomes attributes

The part of a WordPress codebase that grows fastest is registration: register_post_type(), add_action(), register_rest_route(). In Pollora, a class says what it is, and auto-discovery registers it. There is nothing to wire by hand.

use Pollora\Attributes\PostType;
use Pollora\Attributes\PostType\HasArchive;
use Pollora\Attributes\PostType\ShowInRest;
use Pollora\Attributes\PostType\Supports;

#[PostType('book')]
#[HasArchive('books')]
#[Supports(['title', 'editor', 'thumbnail'])]
#[ShowInRest]
class Book
{
}

Hooks work the same way: a method carrying #[Action] or #[Filter] is registered with WordPress, on an instance resolved from the container, so its constructor receives its dependencies.

use Pollora\Attributes\Action;
use Pollora\Attributes\Filter;

class Seo
{
    #[Action('wp_head', priority: 1)]
    public function metaDescription(): void
    {
        if (is_singular()) {
            echo '<meta name="description" content="'.esc_attr(get_the_excerpt()).'">';
        }
    }

    #[Filter('body_class')]
    public function bodyClass(array $classes): array
    {
        $classes[] = 'has-js';

        return $classes;
    }
}

What is in this beta

Beyond the core, this release brings a few things worth naming:

• The WordPress Abilities API, through the new pollora/abilities package: declare an ability with a fluent facade or an #[Ability] class, and AI clients see what it reads, creates or deletes.
• #[Ajax], for admin-ajax actions that check their nonce and capability by default.
• #[SkipDiscovery] and a publishable config/discovery.php, to keep a class or a vendor folder out of discovery.
• pollora_register(), which turns a theme’s functions.php into three lines.
• Smaller packages: hooks, options and Ajax now live in pollora/hook, pollora/option and pollora/ajax, usable outside the framework.

Why 13.32?

The previous framework tag was v13.4.3. From this release on, Pollora’s version number follows the Laravel release it is built on: 13.32 means Laravel 13.32. One number tells you which Laravel documentation applies to your project, and the skeleton is tagged with the same number as the framework it ships.

Try it

You need PHP 8.4, Composer 2 and a MySQL or MariaDB database.

composer global require pollora/cli
pollora new example-app

composer create-project pollora/pollora example-app works too. The installation guide covers both, and Why Pollora explains where it fits next to Acorn, Sage and plain WordPress.

It is a beta. APIs can still move before the first stable release, and the changelog says so whenever they do. If something breaks, an issue on GitHub helps more than anything else.