Finding joy in WordPress again, with React, Gatsby & GraphQL
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.