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DevinVinson/WordPress-Plugin-Boilerplate
[WordPress] A foundation for WordPress Plugin Development that aims to provide a clear and consistent guide for building your plugins.
A starting scaffold for WordPress plugin development, organized around a Loader class that centralizes hook registration. It's been around since 2011 and reflects the patterns the WordPress core team encouraged before modern PHP tooling was common. Useful if you want a pre-organized folder structure and don't want to stare at a blank file.
The admin/public/includes split is sensible and maps directly to how WordPress itself separates concerns. The Loader class pattern keeps all add_action and add_filter calls in one place rather than scattered across constructors. Internationalization is wired in from the start with a .pot file and proper text domain handling. The uninstall.php separation (vs. register_uninstall_hook) is the correct approach for cleanup.
The setup process is embarrassingly manual — you rename six variations of 'plugin-name' across dozens of files by hand, which is exactly the kind of thing a generator script should handle (and the companion generator site exists but is a separate project). The last meaningful commit was 2022; WordPress development has moved toward namespaces, Composer autoloading, and WP-CLI scaffolding, none of which this touches. No testing setup at all — not even a placeholder for PHPUnit with WP_Mock or Brain Monkey. For any plugin beyond trivial complexity, you'll quickly find the pattern limiting because there's no service container or DI mechanism, so everything ends up wired through the monolithic Plugin class.