A supercharged open source framework for WordPress

We love WordPress and have used it for over a decade to build rich websites for a range of clients. As well as websites, we also build a lot of bespoke web-based apps, using Laravel. Both frameworks are great, WordPress is a fantastic CMS and Laravel lets you build complex scaleable workflows and integrations. However, we increasingly found ourselves needing to do more within WordPress, to create more technical integrations or to leverage more of the best practice found in the wider PHP community.

In answer to this we decided to create Lumberjack, a powerful MVC (Model View Controller) framework designed to improve the developer experience for WordPress developers. We’ve taken inspiration from the Laravel API and built on top of the incredibly popular Timber plugin.

Open source

Having created and used the framework we recognised just how much value this brought our team and made the decision to open source the project so others could also use it for free.

Rather than just make the code available on GitHub, we wanted to make sure that the product was launched correctly and was easy to engage with. In doing this, we:

• wrote thorough documentation using Gitbook
• created a visual identity for the project to help it have a unique voice distinct from Rareloop
• designed and launched the Lumberjack website

Visual Identity

As well as a logo, colours and typography we leaned heavily into custom illustrations to bring the identity to life. This gave the project the desired tech feel and also allowed us to showcase the talents of our fantastic design team.

Beautiful error states

An important, but often overlooked, user experience journey is when things go wrong. We decided to create delightful error pages for 404 and 500 and make them standard as part of the Lumberjack framework. By default, anyone who uses the framework gets these out of the box. They can also be customised on a site by site basis.

Real trees planted

We named the project Lumberjack as it builds on the popular WordPress plugin called Timber, which in turn builds on the popular templating language called Twig. So wood is a key theme in the whole development stack.

As a business we plant trees each month via Ecologi to offset our team’s personal Carbon Footprint. As Lumberjack is open-source and free to use, we’ve encouraged those that get value from it to also contribute to the forest.