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Overview

WpDotNet is the unmodified WordPress, running compiled purely on .NET, provided as a NuGet package & ready to be used as a part of an ASP NET Core application. WpDotNet comes with additional components and features, making it easy to be used from C# and a .NET development environment in general.

The project does not require PHP to be installed, and is purely built on top of the .NET platform.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have valid credentials to your MySQL server and you have created a database in it. The following quick start expects a database named "wordpress". Database charset "UTF-8" is recommended.

Quick Start

Open or create an ASP NET Core application, version 6.0 or newer.

dotnet new web

Add a package reference to "Peachpied.WordPress.AspNetCore" (note it is a pre-release package):

dotnet add package PeachPied.WordPress.AspNetCore --version 6.5.4-rc-020

Add the WordPress services and set up your database connection (here or in appsettings.json):

builder.Services.AddWordPress(options =>
{
    options.DbHost = "localhost";
    options.DbName = "wordpress";
    // ...
});

Note: the recommended approach is to place the configuration within the appsettings.json configuration file. See configuration for more details.

Add the WordPress middleware within your request pipeline:

// ...
app.UseWordPress();
// ...

Sample App

The sources of a demo WordPress application are available at github.com/iolevel/peachpie-wordpress.

Dashboard

Besides regular WordPress dashboard pages, WpDotNet adds an informational panel on the Dashboard Home page, within the At a Glance widget.

WpDotNet At Glance

The panel provides information about the current .NET runtime version, consumed memory, or total CPU time spent in the whole application. Note that the values are reset if the process is restarted.

Differences

The main differences between regular WordPress running on PHP and WpDotNet running on .NET are:

  • The .NET application and all its plugins/themes need to be compiled before running. Plugins and themes cannot be added after building the project.
  • The WordPress configuration is not set in wp-config.php file anymore. WpDotNet uses ASP.NET Core configuration providers like appsettings.json. See configuration.
  • There is literally no php intepreter; all the PHP standard functions and extensions are re-implemented in .NET and their behavior may differ, i.e. break some functionality. In such case please let us know.

Notes

  • Permalinks are implicitly enabled through the URL rewriting feature.
  • WordPress debugging is implicitly enabled when running in a Development environment (debugging in your IDE).
  • When running on Azure Web App with MySql in App enabled, the database connection is automatically configured.
  • Response caching and response compression are enabled by default when user is not logged in.
  • Most of the original .php files are not present on the file system and cannot be edited.

Next Steps

NuGet