Since learning how to code and becoming a full-time web developer, I have seen many different technologies come and go. Various technologies appear as the next greatest thing and eventually discover their niche market of application. Web development is really a fun landscape that allows you to be both a jack of all trades and a master of one. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure of a career and depending on how big your toolkit of abilities is, you can find yourself building and working on some amazing websites or applications.
Headless WordPress has been a large growing niche that has been gaining ground in the WordPress community ever since Facebook released the first public version of React and Automattic (WordPress’ parent company) declared that PHP would eventually go away from WordPress’ core. With WordPress’ REST API ready and willing, the opportunity to bring React, Vue.js, or other Javascript powered library’s to break a site out of the sometimes clunkiness of WordPress’ core base and make loading and access to information quick and easy, without having to forego a back-end CMS editor, is an exciting prospect for both experience reasons and just general fun.
With React being the largest used, it would seem that would be the easiest choice to learn next. But browse Twitter, go to WordCamp or check out a job board, and you’ll find Vue.js showing up in the conversation just as often. This option to learn both is exactly the path I am going to take, much like I took when ColdFusion and PHP were the new hotness for building websites. While we knew who won, I feel like the winner because of the experience.
Only this time, I am going to document the process. Below is the list of experiments I am going to build and I will add links once I’ve completed each step. I will also be adding these to my Github as an opportunity to allow other developers to respond or comment on my work if they so choose.
React
- Single page site – standalone, no CMS
- Test website with a blog and two pages – WordPress backend
- Single page site – standalone with a blog (no CMS) and using Tailwind CSS (Something else I haven’t tried)
Vue.js
- Single page site – standalone, no CMS
- Test website with a blog and two pages – WordPress backend
Thanks for following along, I think this is going to be fun!
Once I have completed each project, I will make a note at the top of this post when I have updated/added links.
Interesting Links (In no particular order)