How does WPStarter compare to WordPlate and Bedrock

[ibes]

Hi there,

I am happy that it is getting more and more common to use Composer in WordPress land. I just resently stumbled over WP Starter and would like to ask how WP Starter is different from

Bedrock: https://github.com/roots/bedrock and WordPlate: https://github.com/wordplate/wordplate

I see all three projects use composer to require the WP package of John P. Bloch. All three projects make use of .env environments All three projects have found a solution to make MU plugins requirable.

So far I just used WordPlate and am very happy to have Composer in my workflow that way.

Bedrock seems to try to solve quite a lot and felt complicated to me (even if it maybe is not). WordPlate seemed as easy as it can to me - but actually it also needs quite a bit of learning and it makes it's love to Laravel clear by bringing mix and other Laravel components in the project.

I see a couple of things in WP Starter that I have not seen in the other projects and I am wondering if you managed to solve things more elegant than the other projects.

This or that way I am happy that there are options :)

[lkraav]

I asked the same question about Bedrock just recently https://discourse.roots.io/t/research-bedrock-vs-wp-starter-by-gmazzap/14044 and @gmazzap was kind enough to answer with details.

WordPlate I had forgotten about (repo was already starred, I noticed), thanks for the reminder.

I still don't have my first WPStarter project started yet, but v3 release is nearing, I think that will be the time to try.

[gmazzap]

Hi @ibes

thanks for your interest.

I see all three projects use composer to require the WP package of John P. Bloch.

Not really. Bedrock switched to own package.

WP Starter 2 used to require WP package of John P. Bloch, in v3, now in beta, it does not require any specific WP package, but you can require what you prefer.

All three projects make use of .env environments

WP Starter 3 makes use of symfony/dotenv and do not require .env file, but environment variables can be in actual environment, e.g. in platform settings or web server configuration

All three projects have found a solution to make MU plugins requirable.

WP Starter 3 make MU plugins requirable, but do not offer any special feature to use regular plugins as MU plugins (Bedrock has that).

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If you want to learn more about WP Starter 3, that is quite different than its v2 version, you can start reading its docs here: https://github.com/wecodemore/wpstarter/blob/dev/docs/01-Introduction.md

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That said, in all honesty, I don't know much about WordPlate. In the regard of Bedrock this question has been asked other times, and has an answer here https://discourse.roots.io/t/research-bedrock-vs-wp-starter-by-gmazzap/14044/4 (and I might be wrong, but at first glance it seems that differences mentioned there for Bedrock apply to WordPlate as well).

Moreover, WordPlate looks a complete framework that take care of the entire application building (so it looks like an alternative to Bedrock + Sage) WP Starter does nothing like that, and leave people free to use whatever they like to build their applications.

[ibes]

Thanks @gmazzap for the fast and great reply.

Sounds like WP Starter is really an own idea for itself.

I feel like Bedrock and WordPlate are quite similar but different flavors. WP Starter really seems to be a category for itself.

Super curious to follow the development of WP Starter 3. Will watch the repo :)

[gmazzap]

Closing. Maybe we'll document this thing at some point.