Dave learns of headless WordPressI am filling in the missing bits of my understanding of the WordPress ecosystem.

[scripting@daveverse.org]

Dave learns of headless WordPress

I am filling in the missing bits of my understanding of the WordPress ecosystem. Yesterday thanks to a tweet by Matt Mullenweg I learned about “headless” WordPress.

As I understand, headless is basic WordPress, but the users ignore its rendering abilities and rely on other templating systems. They hook into WordPress via its APIs and possibly by going direct to the database?

I’ve created a few templating systems myself over the years and the one in WordPress while powerful can be daunting to newbies. There does not appear to be an “easy mode.”

It seems the market has responded, by keeping the CMS features, editing, user access, networking, and opened up to the full variety of rendering options in 2025.

I think I also understand why they looked at porting Tumblr to run on top of WordPress. It has an elegant templating system.

To answer the question Matt asked, imho, if they offered the option to use other rendering options in “full stack” WordPress, it would answer at least some of the reasons people go headless.

[developerjustin@mastodon.social]

@scripting in my experience, as someone who has built hundreds of WP sites but none headless, performance is often used as a selling point to go headless. You can ship your front end via static file hosting in Cloudflare or GitHub, removing the need for PHP compute at runtime and page caching. That said though, there are more negatives than positives for most sites. In the agency/ad space where I work, the SEO/indexing stuff is too weird. I think the skillsets diff a lot too