README

Hijacking Your WordPress Development Workflow

Ahoy there! Modernize your WordPress development and ship your WordPress themes faster than ever. PressGang anchors your workflow in modern development practices. Build cleaner, faster, smarter themes and navigate your development course to calmer seas.

📖 Read the full documentation at docs.pressgang.dev

Overview

PressGang is a WordPress parent theme framework that brings Timber and Twig templating, MVC-inspired controllers that act as view models, and Laravel-inspired, config-driven bootstrapping (convention over configuration) to WordPress — all on a modern Composer and PSR-4 foundation. Build child themes on a clean, opinionated architecture with a clear separation of concerns, and spend your time on features, not plumbing.

✨ Key Features

🚀 Rapid Development — A solid foundation and conventions that accelerate theme development with clean, modern PHP.
🌲 Timber + Twig — Built on Timber to separate template markup from PHP logic through the Twig templating engine.
🎮 Controller Architecture — MVC-inspired controllers act as view models, preparing context for templates with a clear separation of concerns.
⚓ Convention over Configuration — Inspired by frameworks like Laravel, repetitive WordPress tasks are bootstrapped via declarative config files — less boilerplate, more building.
📦 Composer & PSR-4 — Dependency management via Composer and PSR-4 autoloading for a consistent, modern codebase.
🔧 Flexible by Design — Keeps the core WordPress structure intact. Leverage everything you already know while gaining powerful tools and conventions.

🧭 Core Concepts

⚙️ Config-Driven Bootstrapping

Everything in PressGang starts with a config file. Arrays in config/ declare what gets registered — post types, taxonomies, sidebars, blocks, scripts, styles, and more. Each config file maps to a class in src/Configuration/ by convention (e.g. config/sidebars.php → Sidebars). No queries, no side effects — just declarative registration.

🎮 Controllers

Controllers live in src/Controllers/ and are view models, not request handlers. Each controller extends AbstractController, gathers data via Timber, builds a context array, and selects a template. They must be side-effect free — no writes, no remote requests, no direct rendering.

Context wiring is declarative: list the template contract in protected array $context_getters = [ 'news', 'events' ] and each key is populated from its get_{key}() getter — no get_context() boilerplate.

🗺️ Template Routing (No Stub Files)

Opt-in via config/service-providers.php (add TemplateRoutingServiceProvider alongside the defaults) — existing themes built on explicit template stubs are untouched by framework upgrades. Once enabled, requests route to controllers by convention — most themes need no template PHP files at all. WordPress's template hierarchy candidates are recorded per request, kebab-case twins are added for underscored post type/taxonomy names (taxonomy-event_type also matches taxonomy-event-type), and when a request falls through to a parent-theme template the dispatcher resolves a child controller:

search → SearchController, front-page → FrontPageController (StudlyCase)
archive-event → EventsController (plural for archives)
single-event → EventController, taxonomy-event-type → EventTypeController (singular subjects)

The matching {candidate}.twig renders when the child theme has one. config/controllers.php maps any name that defies convention, and a physical template file in the child theme always wins — keep one only for genuine logic (e.g. conditional controller selection).

Page templates are file-less too: config/page-templates.php registers them ('page-templates/contact-page.php' => 'Contact Page' — legacy file-shaped ids keep existing page assignments working), and each resolves to {Slug}Controller or falls back to PageController with {slug}.twig.

Explicit routing still works — and always takes precedence. A template stub in the child theme renders exactly what it says, which is how existing PressGang themes are built and how a theme adopts convention routing incrementally (delete stubs one at a time):

<?php
// archive-event.php
use MyTheme\Controllers\EventsController;

PressGang\PressGang::render(
    controller: EventsController::class,
    twig: 'archive-event.twig'
);

🌍 Context Managers

Context managers enrich the global Timber::context() with data needed across many templates — menus, site info, theme mods, ACF option pages. They implement ContextManagerInterface, are registered via config/context-managers.php, and must be safe to run on every request (frontend, admin, AJAX, CLI).

🧩 Twig Extensions

All custom Twig functions, filters, and globals are registered through extension managers configured in config/twig-extensions.php. Twig remains a presentation-only layer — no database queries, no mutations, no business logic.

Timber Twig environment options (including compilation cache) are configured through config/timber.php, allowing child themes to opt in per project.

🧱 Blocks & Snippets

Gutenberg blocks are declared in config/blocks.php and live under blocks/<block-name>/ with a block.json and Twig template. Snippets are reusable view partials registered via config/snippets.php — self-contained, explicitly parameterised UI components.

📋 Requirements

PHP 8.3+
WordPress 6.4+
- For PHP 8.5 runtime support, use WordPress 6.9+
Timber 2.0+
Composer

🚀 Getting Started

PressGang is a WordPress parent theme that acts as a framework for your child theme.

Quick Start with PressGang-Child

The fastest way to weigh anchor is with the pressgang-child starter repo:

git clone https://github.com/pressgang-wp/pressgang-child your-theme-name
cd your-theme-name
composer install

Then follow the instructions in that repo's README to configure your child theme.

Manual Setup

Clone PressGang into your wp-content/themes/ directory:
```
git clone https://github.com/pressgang-wp/pressgang
```
Create your own child theme that extends PressGang.

Composer Installation

Require PressGang as a dependency in your child theme:

composer require pressgang-wp/pressgang

🧪 Testing

composer install          # install dev dependencies
composer test             # run the unit test suite
composer test:compat      # run tests with strict PHP error reporting

Tests use PHPUnit + BrainMonkey — no WordPress installation required. See the Testing docs for details on writing new tests.

📖 Documentation

Uncover the buried treasure at: docs.pressgang.dev

📄 License

PressGang is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.

pressgang-wp / pressgang

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