timber/timber
Timber
Timber is a PHP library that integrates the Twig template engine into WordPress themes, providing an object-oriented framework for theme development. It wraps WordPress data — posts, terms, users, menus, and comments — in structured PHP classes, allowing developers to work with objects instead of raw arrays while keeping HTML markup separate from PHP logic through Twig templates.
The library distinguishes itself by offering a complete set of tools for modern WordPress theme building. It includes a file-based template hierarchy with fallback chains, dynamic image manipulation with resizing, cropping, and responsive srcset generation, and a cache-as-you-go system that caches compiled templates and rendered output with configurable expiration. Timber also supports multisite management, custom object class mapping, and incremental theme adoption, letting developers replace parts of an existing theme piece by piece. It provides WP-CLI commands for cache management and data inspection, and enables direct PHP function calls from Twig templates without writing custom filters or extensions.
Beyond its core identity, Timber covers a broad surface of content and media handling. It offers object-oriented access to posts, pages, menus, comments, users, and taxonomies, with pagination, metadata retrieval, and rendering for template display. The library includes tools for navigation menu building, comment threading, excerpt generation, and shortcode processing, as well as integration with Advanced Custom Fields and WooCommerce. It also provides debugging features like template origin tracing and variable inspection, security measures such as autoescaping and content sanitization, and internationalization support with string translation in Twig templates and .pot file extraction via WP-CLI.
