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:

1. A headless & more secure WordPress install with Bedrock
2. Extending the REST-API to extract the most from your CMS
3. Setting up your front-end with Gatsby
4. Understanding how Gatsby uses WordPress to 'build itself'
5. Learning some key GraphQL queries to extract what you need
6. Swapping WordPress plugins, with Gatsby plugins, to do things like:
   • Form handling
   • SEO & XML sitemaps
   • Image optimisation
   • and more...
7. 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.