Headless WP Podcast

Kirk Schwenkler is a Solutions Architect for the Developer Platform at Cloudflare. Lots of our architecture at WP Engine uses Cloudflare in different ways, as I’m sure many other tech companies do as well, so we wanted to have Kirk on to unpack some of the interesting things that Cloudflare can do for you and your projects. 

We dive into some of the following topics:

• Defining the role edge compute and CDNs play in web architecture
• The difference between Cloudflare workers and traditional origin servers
• The nuances of storing your data at the edge
• How the edge can work in conjunction with headless WordPress

Headless WordPress resources:
https://developers.wpengine.com

Daniel Roe is on the framework team for Nuxt, a Vue-based full-stack framework. Some of our most popular content is on Nuxt and headless WordPress. A new version of Nuxt, Nuxt 3, reached a stable release late in 2022. This new version comes packed with feature upgrades and Daniel has graciously agreed to join us to help us learn more about this new version of an awesome framework. In this podcast, we get into some of the following topics:
✔️ What's new in Nuxt 3 vs. Nuxt 2
✔️ Using the Composition API vs. Options API in Vue 3
✔️ Details about the Nuxt ecosystem

Nuxt 3:
https://nuxt.com/docs/getting-started/introduction

Daniel's Website & Twitter:
https://roe.dev/
https://twitter.com/danielcroe

Headless WordPress resources:
https://developers.wpengine.com

Jonny Harris is a London-based WordPress developer specializing in large-scale WordPress projects and runs the Spacedmonkey consultancy. Jonny has been developing websites for over 10 years. He is most known for his open-source work in WordPress core, where he’s worked on things like Gutenberg, multisite, and the REST API. His list of former clients and employers includes names like Time Inc. UK, Google, Unsplash, and Skyscanner. Over the last year or so, Jonny has worked with the performance team in WordPress core to make WordPress faster and more performant, so we’re here to pick his brain about the WordPress backend. 

During this podcast, we touch on these topics:

• Jonny's innovative client work with organizations like Google, Skyscanner, and Unsplash
• Using WordPress with a low-footprint database layer like SQLite
• Scaling WordPress multisite databases with tools like LudicrousDB
• Blocks, Gutenberg, headless WordPress, and the wp-rest-blocks plugin
• Recent performance improvements to the REST API

Jonny's GitHub
https://github.com/spacedmonkey
Jonny's Website
https://www.spacedmonkey.com/
Jonny's Twitter
https://twitter.com/thespacedmonkey

In this episode, Fran and Jeff catch up with Jason Bahl, the creator of WPGraphQL to discuss a new caching extension for WPGraphQL. Jason is a figure in the headless WordPress ecosystem that likely needs no introduction, but the group discusses some of their early experiences with headless WordPress.

WPGraphQL Smart Cache makes a user's GraphQL queries more efficient by providing network and object caching layer options for users using the plugin. Jason explains a ton of interesting technical details about the caching implementations. He digs into the following things:

• Using GET/POST requests with network requests 
• How cache invalidation works in this plugin in a nuanced way
• How Smart Cache can work with framework rendering patterns
• What other hosting companies can do to enable WPGraphQL Smart Cache on their platform
• How object caching works in the plugin if you can't integrate with a network hosting layer
• How a new feature called persisted queries allows you to store your queries on the server, like a SQL stored procedure
• Considerations for people using plugins or extensions to store custom data

Check out the plugin in WordPress plugin repository and leave the WPGraphQL team some feedback or a review: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpgraphql-smart-cache/

Jason's Twitter
https://twitter.com/jasonbahl

Jason's GitHub
https://github.com/jasonbahl

WPGraphQL
https://github.com/wp-graphql/wp-graphql

WPGraphQL Smart Cache
https://github.com/wp-graphql/wp-graphql-smart-cache

WPGraphQL Smart Cache with Next.js and Apollo by Fran Agulto
https://developers.wpengine.com/blog/wpgraphql-smart-cache-with-next-js-and-apollo

In this podcast episode, Fran and Jeff talk with Rob Humar, the head of web development at Dexertos, the world's largest esports publishing platform. As a media company, Dexertos does around 60 million monthly page views. Rob walks us through some of the details of the Dexertos tech stack, which includes Next.js and headless WordPress using WPGraphQL.

Rob discusses how the primary driver of their switch to headless was new feature velocity and futureproofing their frontend stack. By sticking with WordPress as the CMS for their 80K posts, they were able to gain some of the benefits of a full rewrite without migrating CMSs. As we dig into the details, we talk about how Dexertos uses Next.js ISR WPGraphQL Smart Cache to handle some of the demands of breaking real-time news.

As an international publisher, Dexertos also has sites in French and Spanish, and Rob describes how they manage all of this using WordPress multisite for the CMS and using one Next.js codebase across all three different sites.

Rob walks us through what the experience for the content editor looks like on the Dexertos site, which limits some of the choices in the block editor and uses ACF to structure data for custom post types.
 
As of December 2022, Dexertos won esports coverage platform of the year, which is a testament to the work Rob and his team are doing on their platform.

In this episode, Fran and Jeff talk with Sam Bhagwat, the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Gatsby Cloud, about the modular web and Sam’s new book. The group spends some time talking about Gatsby’s origins and how it serves the use cases of the content web. 

During the conversation, Sam provides a good overview of the architectural patterns that underpin the modular web and we talk about some of the different ways people talk about these moving pieces: JAMstack, decoupled, headless, etc.

Sam has spent a lot of time working with organizations making the move towards modular, and he lays out a bunch of different classes of benefits as well as profiles of organizations making the switch. 

The conversation shifts towards the struggle of businesses integrating 3rd party systems, and Sam gives us a sneak peek into Gatsby’s Valhalla solution. The service was launched publicly since the time of this recording. 

When considering WordPress as a headless CMS, Sam shares his thoughts on how supporting the functionality of popular plugins is one of the opportunities we have in the ecosystem.

Sam’s Posts on Gatsby

Sam’s Twitter

Sam’s Book “​​Modular: The Web's New Architecture: (And How It's Changing Online Business)”  

In this episode, Jeff and Fran chat with Salma Alam-Naylor, a Staff Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify, about the state of the JAMstack ecosystem. We kick off the discussion by exploring the values of learning in public with tech blogs and dig into Salma's background in music and teaching.

You can read Salma's evolving thoughts on frameworks for the web, and check out the WTF project itself.  We touch on a lot of interesting topics about programming languages in general, current trends toward HTML-focused frameworks, and how the edge can support developers in a variety of use cases.

This is a wide-ranging conversation about some of the philosophies about the building blocks of the web. Salma is a prolific tech blogger, with tons of useful and thought-provoking posts. Please check out her blog or catch a stream:

Salma's Website
Salma's Twitch Stream

In this episode, Fran and Jeff talk to Fred Schott, the co-creator of the Astro framework. Astro is a newer JavaScript framework that focuses on creating super fast content-focused sites. There is a ton of love in the JS community for Astro, and we dig into Astro's origin stories and some of Fred's background with build tools. 

Astro aims to reduce complexity by offering a server-first, zero-JS by default experience for building sites. For WordPress developers who've done some work with PHP, Astro invokes a lot of that simplicity. Astro also doesn't ship a frontend framework by default, so you can use React, Vue, Svelte, or any other framework you want. We touch on some additional benefits of Astro as well:

• Islands architecture
• Client directives for selectively loading JS
• How Astro focuses on prioritizing content-focused sites

Fred shares with us some of the future goals of Astro and talks about how it fits into the community.

Astro Website

Astro Discord Server

In this episode, Fran and Jeff talk with Chris Wiegman, the Engineering Manager of the team working on WP Engine's Faust framework. During this quarter, the Faust framework has undergone a massive overhaul and Chris spends some time sharing details on those updates:

• Moving from GQty to Apollo for data fetching 
• Implementing WP routing and template hierarchy
• Adding plugin functionality to Faust with hooks/actions
• Q4 actions towards Gutenberg support

If you're interested in the development of Faust, keep an eye on this space over the coming months.

After teasing the possibility of renaming Faust, the current name will stick for this release, but this episode was recorded while that decision was still in flux, so please excuse any artifacts of that conversation that didn't get edited out : )

Faust Website
Chris' Website
Apollo GraphQL Client
GQty

In this episode, Fran and Jeff catch up with Colby Fayock, a previous guest and a Senior Developer Experience Engineer at Cloudinary. This episode touches on how Cloudinary can help developers offload, optimize, and transform images using their APIs or use their WordPress plugin for a native integration with WP admin. The group discusses how they should approach learning new technologies and explores how people in developer relations play a role in helping developers process and filter changes. Colby also maintains a popular Next.js starter for headless WordPress, so the group discusses general thoughts about headless WordPress and its approachability. 

Colby's Website
Colby's Twitter
Cloudinary
Cloudinary WordPress Integration