I've worked with WordPress for over 10 years. It's a great platform, and there's no doubt that its come a long way and progressed from a simple blog publishing platform, to a more of a CMS (albeit through the addition of some incredible plugins).
But the way that Automattic steam-rolled the community into adopting Gutenberg, combined with me being bored with WordPress and wanting a new challenge, led to me giving up on the platform and moving onto other things.
Fast-forward 7 months and my new employer tasked me with a WordPress project (meh), but suggested we give Gatsby a try (huzzah). It's only been a couple weeks now, but I'm finding renewed joy and enthusiasm for the stack.
Here's why.
1. It keeps clients happy.
Inspite of it being arguably out-performed by other systems like Laravel or Directus, WordPress is still a great platform. And because of how mainstream it is, it's familiar to end-users and they're comfortable with it.
2. It keeps you happy.
Stands to reason that if you're working with a fun stack, you're going to enjoy your job more. The combination of WordPress, React, Gatsby and GraphQL is just that - fun.
Over the next couple weeks I will be creating some content around some libraries, tips & tricks, methodologies and systems that I've put to use in this site build, and that have made work fun again.
You can look forward to:
- A headless & more secure WordPress install with Bedrock
- Extending the REST-API to extract the most from your CMS
- Setting up your front-end with Gatsby
- Understanding how Gatsby uses WordPress to 'build itself'
- Learning some key GraphQL queries to extract what you need
- Swapping WordPress plugins, with Gatsby plugins, to do things like:
- Form handling
- SEO & XML sitemaps
- Image optimisation
- and more...
- Deploying a Gatsby site, and triggering builds with WordPress webhooks
Join me on this journey, as I make WordPress development fun again.
PS: This post will be updated with links to the other posts in this series, as they are written.
Latest comments (58)
Hello friends, I'm trying to source from WordPress to gatsby, but my WordPress site is only a single page, as a landing page, built with Elementor.
Unfortunately, I didn't find any tutorial or guide showing me how to do this correctly. My gatsby site only gets a home listing one post (the "hello world" post).
How can I source from a WordPress site built with Elementor correctly?
The only thing I love about the WordPress front-end is the ability to create excellent web sites quickly using the "Elementor" page-builder. If I go headless with Gatsby, I don't mind losing the "wizard" or "drag-and-drop" simplicity of Elementor, but I'd like to know what tool(s) or repositories I could leverage that would optimize the speed of delivering a beautiful site design. I don't want to suddenly spend weeks or months achieving what I could do with Elementor in hours. Any advice?
Oh man, this is going to be great to see! I can relate a lot to your points. I’ve used WordPress for over 6 years now, but have been bored and disappointed at it’s limitations the past 4 without going off to JavaScript frameworks. Last year I learned about Gatsby and others alike and have wondered about trying them to move out of WordPress. This series will be ideal. Bookmarked. Thanks!
Sweet! Really looking forward to this, Markus. My WP life needs a new spark too.
Looking forward to reading these
This great! I started learning how to code a couple of years ago and I want to be able to build projects for clients but still have fun in the process as well learning new things
I actually don't like Wordpress but I'm stan of Gatsby. Next time i have to work with a Wordpress project, I'll suggest this approach.
Have you found a solution to post and page previews?
Nice!
That's so fantastic. I absolutly felt in love with the combo WordpressCLI + Gatsby 😍😍
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