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Sage Laravel Package
roots/sage
Sage is a modern WordPress starter theme from Roots, bringing Laravel-style Blade templates, Acorn, Tailwind CSS, and Vite for a fast, elegant development workflow and cleaner, more maintainable theme code.
WordPress starter theme with Laravel Blade components and templates, Tailwind CSS, and block editor support
Frequently asked questions about Sage
- What is Roots Sage and how does it relate to Laravel?
- Sage is a WordPress starter theme that brings Laravel conventions into WordPress front-end development, including Blade templates and components, service providers via Acorn, Composer autoloading, Tailwind CSS, and Vite. It is not a Laravel package you install into an existing app, because the Composer name roots/sage is scaffolded into your theme repository and becomes your own code. Its value is strongest for teams already fluent in Laravel who also have to ship WordPress sites.
- How do I install Roots Sage?
- You install it with composer create-project roots/sage your-theme-name, then place the resulting directory in wp-content/themes, activate it in the WordPress admin, and run npm install and your Vite build. Installation itself is trivial and low risk. The real work starts afterwards, because from that point forward the theme is a fork you own and maintain.
- Can I composer require roots/sage inside an existing Laravel application?
- No. Sage is a starter theme, not a library, so it is designed to be created as a standalone project and forked into your theme repository rather than required as a managed dependency. Treating it as a Composer dependency removes the clean upgrade path you might expect and conflicts with how theme files must live inside WordPress. If you want Laravel-style tooling inside WordPress, Sage is still the right choice, but adopt it as a scaffold.
- What are the requirements for Sage, including PHP and WordPress versions?
- Sage requires PHP 8.1 or newer, WordPress 6.x, Composer, Node LTS, and Acorn, which is pulled in through Composer. Because Acorn and the build tooling evolve between major Sage releases, you should confirm the exact PHP, WordPress, and Acorn versions assumed by the specific tag you pin before deploying. Always pin a version such as v11.2.1 and verify your host sits inside that window.
- How do Blade templates and components work in a WordPress theme with Sage?
- Acorn provides the Blade compiler inside WordPress, so you write theme templates and reusable components using standard Blade syntax, directives, and component slots. Controllers can be attached to templates to keep data preparation out of markup, which is a large part of why Sage themes stay maintainable as they grow. If your developers already know Blade from Laravel, there is essentially no new templating syntax to learn.
- How do I update Sage when a new version is released?
- Upstream releases arrive as diffs you merge or cherry-pick into your fork, not as composer update events, so every version bump is a manual reconciliation against your customized templates. The practical approach is to keep your fork as close to upstream as possible, track what you have overridden, and assign a named owner for upstream merges with a defined review cadence. Patch releases like v11.2.1 are a good low-stakes exercise to validate that merge workflow.
- Is it safe to adopt Sage v11.2.1 in production?
- v11.2.1 is a narrow single-PR patch that fixes quotation-mark handling in the search query field, with no schema, config, or API changes, so the blast radius is small and the failure mode is graceful. The main caveat is that if you overrode searchform.blade.php or search results templates, you will not inherit the fix and must port it manually. The release notes do not state whether the quotation-mark change has any escaping or XSS relevance for reflected query output, so confirm that rather than assume it.
- What does upgrading from Sage 10 or Sage 9 to Sage 11 involve?
- Each major Sage release has reworked build tooling and Acorn coupling, so plan upgrades as scoped projects rather than painless minor bumps. Moving from Sage 10 to 11 is not forced by the v11.2.1 patch itself, but it signals that the build and Acorn migration is pending and should be scheduled deliberately. Coming from a classic WordPress theme is a different scale entirely, effectively a template rewrite plus an asset pipeline replacement.
- How do Tailwind CSS and Vite work in a Sage theme?
- Sage ships with Tailwind CSS for styling and Vite for asset bundling, with a manifest produced by the build step that WordPress reads to load hashed assets. You control the npm scripts and the CI step that runs the production build, so make sure your deployment pipeline generates the Vite manifest before the theme is served. Treat the build pipeline as part of your infrastructure ownership, not as something Sage handles for you.
- What are the alternatives to Sage and when should I choose something else?
- Timber is the closest alternative for Blade-like templating in WordPress, and a well-structured classic or block theme remains viable for simpler sites. Sage is the strongest fit when your organization already runs Laravel and wants shared CI patterns, Blade component conventions, and a single mental model across both stacks. If you have no Laravel presence and no appetite for permanently maintaining a forked theme, the benefit narrows to modern tooling and the ownership cost becomes harder to justify.
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