✍️A Note from the Author
❤️ A Labour of Love
PressGang is a labour of love more than fifteen years in the making.
It grew out of a simple goal: to make WordPress development more enjoyable, more maintainable, and faster to build and prototype with — without fighting the platform itself.
What started as a personal toolkit to consolidate reusable patterns across client projects gradually evolved into something more formal. Much of that work happened in delivery-focused agency environments, where clarity, consistency, and clean handover genuinely matter.
From early on, PressGang stood on the shoulders of giants — particularly Timber + Twig 🌲 — whose separation of PHP logic from presentation fundamentally reshaped how I think WordPress themes should be structured.
In parallel, Laravel strongly influenced my preference for explicit structure and convention over configuration.
🧠 Influences & Approach
PressGang doesn't try to turn WordPress into Laravel, nor does it attempt to reshape WordPress into something it isn't.
Instead, it borrows what translates well:
Namespaced, PSR-4 autoloaded PHP
Explicit configuration
Clear architectural boundaries
All while working entirely within WordPress's native theme and runtime model, not around it ⚙️.
There's no attempt to hide WordPress, replace it, or abstract it beyond recognition — the goal is to work with WordPress, but in a way that feels modern, explicit, and maintainable.
🏗️ Where It Is Today
Today, PressGang is a modern WordPress parent theme framework designed for bespoke, long-lived professional websites.
At its core:
Composer-based foundations
Controller-driven context passed cleanly to Twig via Timber
Clear extension points intended for child themes
It's deliberately opinionated but lightweight, avoiding heavy abstraction and hidden "magic" in favour of clarity and developer control.
🌍 Real-World Use
PressGang has been shaped almost entirely by real production work.
It's been used across hundreds of projects at several agencies I've worked with — many of whom adopted it and continued using it long after I'd moved on.
It has powered themes for:
Global organisations
Large brands
Ecommerce stores
SMEs
Grassroots projects — including my local cyclocross league 🚴♂️
That long-term, real-world usage has been its strongest form of validation.
🔗 Links
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