acorn-prettify: Acorn Prettify: The WordPress Cleanup Tool That Thinks Like Laravel
A deep dive into how Roots turned front-end bloat removal into a modular, DOM-aware package for Acorn sites.
Key Takeaways
- Acorn Prettify matters because it turns WordPress cleanup into a package architecture with modules, guards, and a service provider.
- Its real upgrade is not feature count, but the shift from regex-heavy theme hacks to DOM-aware HTML rewriting.
- The project is best understood as the Acorn-native successor to Soil, with stricter behavior and a cleaner developer workflow.
- It is aimed at Roots teams who want predictable, code-based front-end hygiene, not at casual WordPress users hunting for a GUI plugin.
Acorn Prettify is easiest to understand as a design decision, not a feature bundle. It takes a messy WordPress job, stripping bloat from front-end output, and gives it the shape of a Laravel package.
WordPress cleanup, but as a package system
That shape matters. Instead of dumping behavior into a theme file full of hooks, Acorn Prettify organizes cleanup into modules managed by a service provider and driven by config/prettify.php.
// Conceptually, the package flow looks like this:
$modules = collect(config('prettify.modules'));
foreach ($modules as $moduleClass => $moduleConfig) {
app($moduleClass, ['config' => $moduleConfig])->register();
}





