WordPress ORM with Eloquent

WordPress ORM with Eloquent is a small library that adds a basic ORM into WordPress, which is easily extendable and includes models for core WordPress models such as posts, post metas, users, comments and more. The ORM is based on Eloquent ORM and uses the WordPress connection (wpdb class).

Tip

To simplify the integration of this library, we recommend using WordPress with one of the following tools: Bedrock, Themosis or Wordplate.

Features

• ✅ Support core WordPress models: Comment, Option, Post, Term, TermTaxonomy, TermRelationship, User, PostMeta and UserMeta
• ✅ Support core WordPress post types: Article, Attachment and Page
• ✅ Based on core WordPress database connection (wpdb class), no configuration required
• ✅ Custom functions to filter models with meta
• ✅ Meta casting (e.g. Attribute Casting)
• ❤️ Easy integration of a custom post and comment type
• ❤️ Easy model creation for projects with custom tables
• ❤️ All the features available in Eloquent are usable with this library

Not yet developed but planned in a future version:

• 🗓️ Create migration tool with Eloquent
• 🗓️ Multisite support (network-shared tables and switch_blog() handling)

Documentation

This documentation only covers the specific points of this library, if you want to know more about Eloquent, the easiest is to look at the documentation of Eloquent.

You can find all the documentation in the wiki.

Installation

Requirements

This package targets a stricter runtime than WordPress itself:

• PHP >= 8.3
• WordPress >= 6.3
• Composer

Installation

You can use Composer. Follow the installation instructions if you do not already have composer installed.

composer require dbout/wp-orm

In your wp-config.php make sure you include the autoloader:

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

🎉 You have nothing more to do, you can use the library now. No need to configure database accesses because the wpdb connection is used.

Quick start

Once installed, every model is ready to use without any configuration. Here are the most common patterns:

Retrieve a model

use Dbout\WpOrm\Models\Post;
use Dbout\WpOrm\Models\User;

$post = Post::find(42);
$post = Post::findOneByName('hello-world');

$user = User::findOneByEmail('john@example.com');

Query with the builder

use Dbout\WpOrm\Enums\PostStatus;
use Dbout\WpOrm\Models\Post;

$publishedPosts = Post::query()
    ->whereStatus(PostStatus::Publish)
    ->whereTypes('post', 'page')
    ->orderBy(Post::DATE, 'desc')
    ->limit(10)
    ->get();

Create or update a model

use Dbout\WpOrm\Models\Post;

$post = new Post();
$post->setPostTitle('Hello world');
$post->setPostName('hello-world');
$post->setPostType('post');
$post->save();

$post->setPostTitle('Hello, again');
$post->save();

Work with metas

$post->setMeta('color', 'blue');
$value = $post->getMetaValue('color');     // 'blue'
$post->hasMeta('color');                    // true
$post->deleteMeta('color');

// Filter posts by meta value
Post::query()
    ->addMetaToFilter('color', 'blue')
    ->addMetaToSelect('size')
    ->get();

Use relations

$post = Post::find(42);

$author = $post->author;        // BelongsTo User
$comments = $post->comments;    // HasMany Comment
$parent = $post->parent;        // BelongsTo Post (self)

For everything else (eager loading, scopes, transactions, casts…), see the Eloquent documentation — every Eloquent feature works out of the box.

Security notes

Warning

Mass assignment is wide open by default. Every model inherits protected $guarded = [], which means every column is mass-assignable. A call like User::create($_POST) would let a caller set sensitive fields such as user_pass. When you accept user input, always pre-validate it or override $fillable / $guarded on the model:

class SafeUser extends \Dbout\WpOrm\Models\User
{
    protected $fillable = [
        self::LOGIN,
        self::EMAIL,
        self::DISPLAY_NAME,
    ];
}

Warning

Multisite is not supported in this release. The library does not handle network-shared tables or switch_blog(). After a switch_blog() call, the connection prefix is not refreshed and models targeting shared tables (User, UserMeta) may produce incorrect queries on subsites. Multisite support is planned for a future release — track the milestone for progress.

Testing

🐞 This project includes two types of tests:

• Unit tests - Isolated tests without WordPress dependencies
• WordPress tests - Integration tests with WordPress core (uses wp-phpunit/wp-phpunit)

Both suites run on PHPUnit 12.

Running tests:

# Unit tests
composer run test:unit

# WordPress tests (requires Docker)
./run-wp-tests.sh

# With coverage
./run-wp-tests.sh --coverage

Local setup:

WordPress tests require Docker and Subversion. The run-wp-tests.sh script automatically sets up a MySQL container and installs WordPress test environment. WordPress files are cached in var/testings/ for faster subsequent runs.

See TESTING.md for detailed setup instructions and troubleshooting.

Contributing

💕 🦄 We encourage you to contribute to this repository, so everyone can benefit from new features, bug fixes, and any other improvements. Have a look at our contributing guidelines to find out how to raise a pull request.