Headless WP Podcast WP Engine Developer Relations

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 architectureThe difference between Cloudflare workers and traditional origin serversThe nuances of storing your data at the edgeHow 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 UnsplashUsing WordPress with a low-footprint database layer like SQLiteScaling WordPress multisite databases with tools like LudicrousDBBlocks, Gutenberg, headless WordPress, and the wp-rest-blocks pluginRecent performance improvements to the REST APIJonny'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 wayHow Smart Cache can work with framework rendering patternsWhat other hosting companies can do to enable WPGraphQL Smart Cache on their platformHow object caching works in the plugin if you can't integrate with a network hosting layerHow a new feature called persisted queries allows you to store your queries on the server, like a SQL stored procedureConsiderations for people using plugins or extensions to store custom dataCheck 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)”