Orestis Samaras - Modern WordPress Development with Composer

Discover how to bring modern PHP development practices into your WordPress projects using Composer. This talk explores how dependency management, autoloading, and environment configuration, can simplify your setup, improve maintainability, version control and deployment consistency and make your WordPress development more efficient and professional. Perfect for developers looking to modernize their WordPress toolkit and streamline their workflow.

Transcript

1. Modern WordPress Development with Composer Simplify your setup & improve project maintainability
2. Who am I 👦 Orestis Samaras 📌 Thessaloniki 🐘 PHP Developer 💻10+ years WordPress 💚 Traveling & food
3. Agenda What Why How Q&A 01 02 03 04
4. What is Composer • Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. • Similar to NPM, Pipenv, Maven etc.
5. What is a dependency • A dependency is a package your project needs to work properly • A package is any piece of code (plugin, theme, library etc.) • Examples: Monolog, WP-CLI, WordPress, PHPUnit…
6. Why use Composer • Ease of use & maintainability • Autoloading & structure • Version control • Streamlining processes
7. Why use Composer • List of dependencies and their versions for each project • PHP version, extensions & libraries requirements • Quick package installations and updates • Easily check for outdated packages Ease of use & maintainability
8. Why use Composer • No more manual require statements - classes load automatically • Cleaner, more organized code (using PSR-4) Autoloading & structure
9. Why use Composer • Clean and slim repositories • Simplified collaboration Version Control
10. Why use Composer • CI/CD pipelines • Reproducible & predictable environments • Execution of scripts Streamlining processes
11. How to use Composer • Installation • Configuration file • Package versions • Package sources • Composer & WordPress
12. How to use Composer • Use a CLI script • Use installer (Windows only) Installation
13. How to use Composer • Everything controlled through a single file • composer.json contains: ◦ required dependencies and their allowed versions ◦ autoloading instructions ◦ meta information ◦ scripts • Generates composer.lock Configuration file
14. How to use Composer • Exact version: 1.0.0 • Tilde version: ~1.0 or ~1.0.0 ◦ Only the last digit can increase • Caret version: ^1.0.0 ◦ All digits can increase, except the first (no major version updates) • Wildcard: 1.0.* • Range: >=7.4 || ^8.0 • VCS branches, tags, hashes Package versions
15. How to use Composer • Composer uses different sources (repositories) to look for and download packages • Default is packagist.org • Custom repositories can be specified: ◦ VCS repositories (Git, SVN, etc.) ◦ Packages on other platforms (e.g. wpackagist.org, satis installations etc.) ◦ Artifact (locally hosted files) Package sources
16. How to use Composer • Set up composer.json and index.php • Run composer install • Update wp-config.php • Enjoy 🪄 with WordPress
17. { "require": { "composer/installers": "^2.0", "roots/wordpress": "^6.8", "wpackagist-plugin/woocommerce": "^10.2", "wpackagist-theme/twentytwentyfive":"^1.3" }, “require-dev”: { “phpunit/phpunit”: “^12.4” }, "repositories": [ { "type": "composer", "url":"https://wpackagist.org" } ], "extra": { "installer-paths": { "wp-content/plugins/{$name}": [ "type:wordpress-plugin" ], "wp-content/themes/{$name}": [ "type:wordpress-theme" ] } } } composer.json <?php require realpath(__DIR__ . '/wordpress/index.php'); index.php
18. Questions Time🎙
19. Thank you github.com/o-samaras/wcath-2025-demo linkedin.com/in/orestis-samaras/