From WordPress to Laravel with Zuzana Kunckova

Billable Hours

In this episode, I talk to Zuzana Kunckova of Larabelles about moving from WordPress to Laravel. Zuzana is doing some really amazing community work with underrepresented developers in Laravel. Listen in to hear about some of the differences between WordPress and Laravel.

Links

• Zuzana on Twitter
• Zuzana's website
• Larabelles on Twitter
• Larabelles website
• Onramp

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Transcript of this episode (automatically generated)

Today, I'm really excited to welcome Zuzana Kunckova onto the show. Zuzana is most known for her incredible work with underrepresented developers within the Laravel community through Larabelles. However, she does have a background in WordPress development and today Zuzana and I are going to talk about what it's like to move from WordPress and into Laravel.
You can find Zuzana on Twitter at zuzana_kunckova. And I strongly encourage you to check out Zuzana's project larabelles.com. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about branch. Branch is my business, and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites.
We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that WordPress developers need making it super easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines. It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve. And it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments on your account.
Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying. You can sign up for free on branchci.com. I started this episode by asking Zuzana to take us back to when she first discovered Laravel. Okay. So that was about two years ago. So back then I was working for a digital agency and it was mainly WordPress jobs, but they also had, I think, a couple of bigger Laravel based projects.
So I was doing my, the WordPress side of things, but I got a chance to look into another little project at that point. I knew nothing about Laravel. I mean, I only knew WordPress and I knew it's a bit of JavaScript, but I didn't even know what a lot of it was. So I bought the Laravel up and running book and I started reading that and I watched a few YouTube tutorials.
I knew about Lara cars, but for me back then, it assumed too much previous knowledge for me, Lara, because at the beginning it just wasn't the right fit. So that's how I found out about a lot of it. Like I was taught. Larva is a framework is PHP framework, and this is our project. And do you want to try to.
Do this feature for us. I was like, well, okay. I can try. And yeah. Took it from there. I mean, it wasn't easy because it was so different than anything I knew because I didn't know any other, I don't even know chelas good frameworks or personal frame. I didn't know any backend frameworks, so I didn't learn well.
So for me, everything was. That's really interesting, actually. So I'm created a poll on Twitter or recently where I asked among like my followers that are WordPress agencies or freelancers. How many of them also do other kinds of projects besides WordPress? And one of the options were larval and almost 50% of the people who answered that survey.
And I think it was about 200 people answered that they were also doing level projects. So I think. It's a really big trend. I'm seeing where agencies aren't exclusive WordPress agencies, like they're taking advantage of some of the other newer frameworks that are around. Do you have any sort of idea about why some projects were liable and not WordPress?
Like what was the difference between those projects? I think it was the size. I mean, you can build anything with WordPress pretty much, but if you do want to go. Baker gala, you use a lot more plugins and you will have to do so much customization that at that point, you might as well just do it in Laravel instead of trying to use WordPress for something that was not intended to in the first place.
I mean, you can do, I think pretty much everything in WordPress, but. The question is, should you use WordPress? So I think, uh, once you have a bigger project, when you want some sort of dashboard for the client admin, I mean, yes, we also have WordPress, but WordPress has a look. It has a certain style and the way they do things, and yes, you can customize it slightly, but not too much, not enough.
So if you want to have anything more custom, but you might want to reconsider whether using WordPress sister, right. Choice. Yeah. One of the things I've kind of like experienced, if you would try to do a really big project with WordPress, either, as you said, like you're just stringing it together with a lot of plugins and like, you just hope that they are good plugins.
They're maintained well kind of like crafted, but then like it ends up at as almost like a vanilla PHP project then like, if you really try to customize stuff, like you have to go really bare bones anyway. And it's kind of like start from scratch. You have to see that different tools are right for different kinds of projects, especially with WordPress.
It's important to keep that in mind, because I think work best became known as the tool to do everything with, but good to sometimes stop and thing. Should you really use it? Yeah. Okay. So you, you discovered Laravel and you mentioned Matt Stauffer's book, right? Laravel up and running. What was your firsthand experience?
How did you think about it? Like once you kind of like started getting your feet wet and tried adding some features. And I was like, Oh, it's so many files and folders. What do I do for that? I still remember the first time I got Laravel running on my back then windows machine. So I installed valet, which again, wasn't straightforward to use on windows and what's Valley ballet is the local development for level.
So that's up. So it's quite, once you have it installed, it's really easy. You just install, you know, a lot of a project and then it just works. You can have like a local security, so you can run negative BS websites locally. You can share your mess a lot to do with Valley. I didn't do it the easy way. I just thought, Oh, everyone's using valet.
Let me try to that too. What? I didn't realize that while I was meant for Mac OS while I was a windows computer. So yeah, but I've got it working at the end. First thing was like, Where does everything go? There's so many directories and I didn't understand what they meant. And that was still me looking at the vanilla Laravel installation with no changes to it.
So my initial feeling was like, there's so much, I don't know what to do. Kind of the philosophy behind. Laravel and WordPress are quite different. Like WordPress is a CMS and Laravel is I think most people call it an MVP framework, like model view controller. So it's just a different architecture. So did you have to like step back and kind of like understand the idea behind it or the architecture, or it was so different from WordPress because WordPr...