New Boilerplate Speeds Up Building “Nearly Headless” WordPress Themes
Alex Standiford, a WordPress developer at AffiliateWP, has released a boilerplate for what he is calling a “nearly headless” WordPress theme. It uses Underpin ,Nicholas, and AlpineJS to provide an app-like experience for a website while providing the flexibility for rendering specific pages using PHP instead of Javascript. In a post titled “Headless WordPress is Overrated: A Case for The Nearly-Headless Web App,” Standiford describes a few of the drawbacks of going fully headless. One problem with fully-headless WordPress is routing. Behind the scenes, WordPress has a lot of logic built-in to handle routing, and with a headless approach you have to build something to handle that on the front end. Ultimately, you’re re-inventing the wheel, and it takes a lot of extra time to build.Another problem with headless WordPress quickly becomes apparent the moment you try to use most WordPress plugins. The ugly truth is that you usually have to re-invent a lot of things just to get the plugin working properly. Standiford’s nearly headless system is a product of his rethinking headless WordPress. He wanted to preserve the app-like feel as well as all of WordPress’ built in capabilities and those available through the plugin system. The Nearly Headless WordPress theme…
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