Getting started — overview

Corex is the framework source (a theme + plugins + add-ons in a monorepo). To run it you map that source into a real WordPress install — the repo stays the single source of truth; WordPress core is never committed.

Requirements

• PHP 8.3+ and WordPress 7.0+
• Composer 2 (PHP dependencies + autoload)
• Node 22.22+ and npm (the block/SCSS/JS build, and these docs)
• WP-CLI (install, activate, and the wp corex commands)
• A local stack: WAMP/Apache + MySQL, or wp-env/Docker

The two paths

1. WAMP / Apache + WP-CLI — install WordPress into ./wp, run it on your local Apache. This is how this repository is set up.
2. wp-env / Docker — a throwaway containerised WordPress via @wordpress/env (config already in wp-env.json).

Either way you then wire the monorepo into wp-content/ and do the first run.

The mental model

• theme/ is a skin — presentation only (FSE templates, parts, patterns, tokens). Deactivating it breaks presentation, never data or behaviour.
• plugins/corex-core boots itself on plugins_loaded and is the engine.
• plugins/corex-blocks, plugins/corex-forms, plugins/corex-config and the addons/* mount on the core.
• Build the front-end assets once with npm install && npm run build (see Create a block).

Tip

Run composer install (PHP autoload + dev tools) and npm install (block/docs build) from the repo root before anything else.

Looking for setup, Docker, or deployment guides?

This site is the product & API documentation. Step-by-step local setup (per OS), Docker, deployment recipes (Azure / AWS / cPanel), CI/CD, and team workflow live in the in-repo Developer & Operations Handbook at docs/ — it renders directly on GitHub.