// the find
roots/sage
WordPress starter theme with Laravel Blade components and templates, Tailwind CSS, and block editor support
Sage is a WordPress starter theme that replaces the usual PHP template soup with Laravel Blade components and Vite for the asset pipeline. It requires Acorn, the Roots project that boots a Laravel application container inside WordPress, so you get service providers, Blade directives, and view composers — real MVC structure in a WP theme. It's for developers who need to build professional WordPress sites without writing spaghetti template files.
Blade templating is a genuine upgrade over raw PHP partials — view composers separate data logic from templates cleanly, and the component system in resources/views/components actually works the way modern developers expect. Vite integration with hot module replacement makes front-end development tolerable in 2026. The Acorn dependency means you can register service providers and use Laravel's container, so you can inject properly typed dependencies instead of relying on global WP functions. Block editor support is built in with separate editor CSS entry point, which most WordPress starter themes bolt on awkwardly after the fact.
The Acorn dependency is a significant mental model tax — you're running a Laravel application bootstrapped inside WordPress, and when things break at that seam, debugging requires understanding both stacks simultaneously. The starter theme itself is quite thin: the views directory is just the basic WordPress post types (index, single, page, search, 404) with almost no real component examples, so you're mostly buying the architecture pattern and wiring it up yourself. Tightly coupled to the Roots ecosystem — Trellis for hosting, Bedrock for project structure, Radicle for the paid tier — if you want just the theme without buying into that whole stack, integration friction is real. No tests whatsoever, and the project structure doesn't suggest where you'd put them.