The Laravel News site has posted an interesting tutorial where they describe the use of WordPress as a backend for a Laravel application. This setup is based on the Laravel News' own experience with it in the recent refactoring of the site.

Last week I relaunched Laravel News, and the new site is running on Laravel with WordPress as the backend. I’ve been using WordPress for the past two years, and I’ve grown to enjoy the features that it provides. The publishing experience, the media manager, the mobile app, and Jetpack for tracking stats.

I wasn’t ready to give these features up, and I didn’t have the time to build my own system, so I decided to keep WordPress and just use an API plugin to pull all the content I needed out, then store it in my Laravel application. In this tutorial, I wanted to outline how I set it all up.

While he did find other methods for linking the two, they didn't quite fit with what he wanted so he worked up his own. The content is then synced via a recurring task pulling over posts, categories and tags. He gets into the WordPress REST API first, showing the extraction of the posts from the API and pushing them into a Laravel collection. There's also an example of how to sync a post with the database (API) and how to create a new post in a similar way. Also included is the code to get the featured image, get the category for a post and sync the tag values. The tutorial finishes with the code for the sync command and pushing it into the scheduler.