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.