I'm one of the creators of this (we're the same people behind http://roots.io) so I'm happy to answer any questions. We're just trying to make developing WordPress sites a little more bearable :)
This is my primary new WP project approach (which isn't perfect):
mkdir Example-Project
cd Example-Project
# Grab the latest wordpress, www is our DocumentRoot
curl wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz | tar -xvz --
mv wordpress www
cd www
# Drop the default wp-content and symlink so we dont need to
# keep all of wp in Git
mv wp-content ..
ln -s ../wp-content
echo 'www/' >> .gitignore
# Make the repo
git init
git add . && git commit -m 'First!'
Seems like your issue has to do with your symlink setup. We don't need to do any special configuration with the web server. Here's the configuration that deals with app/: https://github.com/roots/bedrock/blob/master/config/applicat...
Does it do the whole autoloader song and dance with Composer?
Example: If I add Guzzle to Composer, can I call it from my plugin's code the way you can with other frameworks?
Only thing I would change is to swap out Capistrano with Fabric. But that's a personal choice.
But in the example you gave, ideally your custom plugin is itself a Composer package which requires Guzzle in its composer.json file. Then you'd require your plugin in the project's composer.json :)
Re: Capistrano. We're really trying to encourage people to fork this and modify it to their needs. So you could easily rip Cap out and integrate Fabric in your own fork. We're just providing some sensible defaults that we're familiar with.
"composer install" will install from composer.lock.
Upshot, though, there's plenty of documentation and SO threads out there and a huge ecosystem of plugins. Most of the time you never even need to look at the actual source code.
<?php /* pointless comment */ ?>
<?php echo $something; ?><div><?php if($blah){ echo stuff(); ?></div><?php } ?>...
Everything else is just accidental complexity.
https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/master/wp-includ...
If you're interested in work to do with WP/Roots you can check out this thread on our forum: http://discourse.roots.io/t/looking-for-work-post-your-info-...