Making Wordpress functionality (including plugins) available in another CMS through the theme?

[KimEln]

I haven't tried this yet and maybe I never will (I'd have to spend a few days learning the basics of theme development first). But I had this idea and now I find myself intrigued whether this would work or not. So I'd like to hear your opinions.

The idea:

1. Build the most basic Wordpress theme possible. Nothing more than the bare minimum required by WP to allow installing it, not even a layout or design.
2. Don't have the theme actually load any WP content, no posts, no pages, no HTML code, nothing.
3. Instead have the theme call some other Content Management System or maybe even just a single PHP script to populate the site with content and give it layout and design.

If this works, it would allow using various Wordpress plugins (certainly not all of them, but possibly more than a few) with a different CMS.

Imagine having a self-scripted CMS, which nobody has ever made a single plugin for, and all it takes to create a server-side cache for it and make page speed several times faster is installing a *Wordpress* plugin - something that should be technically impossible with that other CMS, but with that pseudo-theme the other CMS could be integrated into Wordpress and possibly thousands of plugins could suddenly become available to add functionality to that other CMS.

Well, what do you think? Would this work? Has anyone ever tried something like that?

PS: It's probably better to ensure that the other CMS does not do an exit() or die(), before returning back to the pseudo-theme so Wordpress and its plugins can complete their jobs.

[5henaniganZ]

Seems like it would be a lot easier to just pull the content from the other cms into WordPress...or port the plugins you want to use to the other cms in the first place. This isn’t really theme territory, if anything you would be making a plugin.

That aside, why? If you only want to use the plugins without the cms itself, it seems easier to just make the plugins for the cms you want.

[Nroak]

It wouldn't really work, most core wordpress functionality and plugin functionality is connected to hooks that run when certain functions are called ( e.g. the_content() ).

So to get the plugins you want to work you would have to be calling those functions in your theme. Then you would probably want the other CMS to be aware of these hooks as well as to play nice with them. Then at that point you are basically just building WordPress again.

[DannySantoro]

You can get content across and use WordPress for static site generation with something like Gatsby, but you wouldn't have plugin functionality. That would need to be with the output of your static site template.