Building with Headless WordPress in a Block-based World

Since the WordPress CMS is mainly used to create traditional sites, implementing certain features of the platform in headless sites has historically been difficult for developers. As the WordPress block editor and full site editing, a paradigm in which the entire WordPress template system is reoriented around blocks, become more widely adopted, it’s clear that any future for headless WordPress must adapt to these new ways of authoring content.

In this talk, we’ll break down the anatomy of WordPress blocks and look at the various ways they can be created and used in site building. Using this knowledge, we’ll look at how we can decouple our sites using block data sourced from either WPGraphQL or the REST API and use them to build interfaces in Next.js or your favorite framework.

In this presentation, you’ll learn about the following topics:
- How native blocks are structured with block markup and block.json
- How ACF blocks can offer an alternative block development flow
- How to query for block data using WPGraphQL and REST APIs
- How to map blocks to custom components using the WordPressBlocksProvider package in Faust.js
- What the future of blocks in headless WordPress looks like: the last stage of the React-Gutenberg bridge, interactive blocks, and FSE
Headless WordPress resources:
https://wpengine.com/builders/headless