Fork this repository into your own account and clone locally so you can work with it.
git clone https://github.com/JEverhart383/first-headless-project-decode-2023.git
cd first-headless-project-decode-2023
From there, drag and drop the WordPress export contained in headlesswpdemo-export.zip file, created by WP Migrate, into your Local development environment. I created these resources with version 6.6.1 on MacOS.
All of the plugins you need should be installed and activated, you can log in with an admin account using these credentials:
Username: admin
Password: BWQqXaXnba(xg&JuBNgAl(7z
Please check out this article on SSL with Local if you have issues using HTTPS on your machine.
This WordPress site comes pre-installed with a few important plugins you'll need on your journey to build this headless site.
Once you've gotten inside of your WordPress install, we can configure Faust.js to work with your WordPress site. To do that, you will need to update some settings in both your WordPress backend and your JavaScript application.
First, open the Settings > Faust page in WP admin. Then set the Front-end site URL value to http://localhost:3000 so that Faust can rewrite requests to your front end.
Next, click Regenerate to create a new Secret Key value and copy that value to your clipboard.
Now, transition back to your terminal and run the following command to create a new .env.local file from the sample:
cp .env.local.sample .env.local
In this file, you will replace the NEXT_PUBLIC_WORDPRESS_URL value with https://acfheadless.wpengine.local/ and the FAUST_SECRET_KEY value with the contents of your clipboard.
# Your WordPress site URL
NEXT_PUBLIC_WORDPRESS_URL=https://acfheadless.wpengine.local/
# Plugin secret found in WordPress Settings->Faust
# FAUST_SECRET_KEY=YOUR_PLUGIN_SECRET
Save this file, and then we're ready to test our connection. Run the following commands to install your JavaScript dependencies:
npm run install
npm run dev
Now, you should have a Faust.js-powered site running on http://localhost:3000!
Out of the box, Faust.js implements a variation of the WordPress template hierarchy that is used with traditional PHP themes. When a route is requested on the front-end site, Faust.js uses Next.js' flexible routing rules to resolve the request.
If there is no route match in the traditional /pages directory, Faust fallbacks to resolving the content using the [...wordpressNode].js page component, which implements the template hierarchy using the template components contained in the wp-templates directory.
To determine which template to use with your content, Faust uses a concept called the seed query to check the URI of the content requested against all of the URIs that WordPress manages. If it finds a match, it sends back some initial information about the content item that can be used to render the template and make additional requests for data.
The idea of using uri instead of slug might be a change for some developers, but after watching hours of developers creating headless WordPress sites, it became clear how much time and effort was spent in managing routing in Next.js that WordPress was already creating for us using its own routing mechanisms. You can read more about the utility of leaning into WordPress uris in this post.
To edit the homepage of your site, open the front page template in /wp-templates/front-page.js to get started. Each template file has three main parts: the component, a GraphQL query, and a variables callback.
The component determines what gets rendered, much like a typical page component would, and the Component.query and Component.variables properties allow us to colocate our queries with our component, and optionally receive the query results as props that are passed to the component or inside of the component using the useQuery hook.
To get the extra data we need to display posts on our homepage, you will need to add the following lines to the Component.query property in the /wp-templates/front-page.js file.
posts(first: 10) {
nodes {
title
excerpt
uri
categories {
nodes {
name
uri
}
}
}
}
This will make our additional post data available inside of our component, but we still need display that data. Add an additional line to your Component code to extract posts into a variable:
const posts = data?.posts?.nodes;
Now you can create an additional component to render the posts inside of the content container.
To create an additional component, create a new directory called /components/PostExcerpt and create these three files inside of the directory:
PostExcerpt.js
index.js
PostExcerpt.modules.scss
First, set the contents of PostExcerpt.js to this:
import styles from './PostExcerpt.module.scss';
export default function PostExcerpt({post}) {
return (
<section className={styles.component}>
<a href={post?.uri}><h3>{post?.title}</h3></a>
<div>
Categories:
{ post?.categories?.nodes.map(category =>{
return (<span key={`${category?.name}-${post?.title}`}>
<a
href={category?.uri}>{category?.name}
</a>
</span>)
})
}
</div>
<div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{__html: post?.excerpt}}></div>
</section>
)
}
This code creates our PostExcerpt component, and imports some our styles and scopes them to the component.
From here, add the following style rules to the PostExcerpt.modules.scss file:
.component {
span {
margin: 0 .25rem;
}
}
Then export the component in components/PostExcerpt/index.js:
export { default as PostExcerpt} from './PostExcerpt'
To make our component available, import and export our new PostExcerpt component from components/index.js:
export { PostExcerpt } from './PostExcerpt';
It's worth noting that the component organization you see here is a convention of the Faust.js getting started template and not a requirement. If you want to organize your components in a different way, or use another styling convention, that is totally up to you.
To make the PostExcerpt component available in our homepage add it to the existing import statement in /wp-templates/front-page.js:
import {
Header,
Footer,
Main,
Container,
NavigationMenu,
Hero,
SEO,
PostExcerpt
} from '../components';
From here, since you've already defined the value of posts in this file, update the Main component code to map through our array of posts and render a PostExcerpt component for each entry:
<Main>
<Container>
<Hero title={'Headless Demo'} />
<div className="text-center">
{posts.map(post => {
return (<PostExcerpt post={post} key={post.title}></PostExcerpt>)
})}
</div>
</Container>
</Main>
Now, if you save this file and refresh your homepage in the browser, the most recent posts should be displayed 🎉
Now that we have an idea of how Faust.js works, you can update your /wp-templates/single.js file to consume and display data from the custom data fields created with ACF. To do that, you'll need to update the query that gets data for a single post and then create some components to display that data. Since we have a few different field groups based on the category, we'll also want to do some conditional rendering to keep the display clean.
When we create field groups and attach them to posts, the ACF for WPGraphQL extension makes these a part of that content object's schema. To pull in the ACF data, you'll need to make some slight modifications to the default query in the /wp-templates/single.js file.
Replace the part of your query that gets a post by its databaseId with this code:
post(id: $databaseId, idType: DATABASE_ID, asPreview: $asPreview) {
title
content
date
author {
node {
name
}
}
sweetMixtape {
album
artist
trackTitle
}
foodResources {
recipeLink
recipeName
}
categories {
nodes {
name
}
}
...FeaturedImageFragment
}
This extends the default query, and gives us access to the post's categories as well as anything defined on the sweetMixtape or foodResources fields.
After these lines are added to the component's query, you destructure them from the component props with the rest of the page data:
const { title, content, featuredImage, date, author, sweetMixtape, foodResources, categories } = props.data.post;
Since we defined both sweetMixtape and foodResources fields on out Post type and requested them in the query, WPGraphQL will return entries for both of these field groups even if only one is present in the database. If we didn't specify a mixtape because a post was in the "Food" category, those entries will be returned as null in the WPGraphQL response.
To make those display conditionally, you can create some variables to use inside of the component to determine when to render specific resources:
const isFood = categories?.nodes.filter(category => category.name === 'Food').length > 0 ? true : false;
const isMusic = categories?.nodes.filter(category => category.name === 'Music').length > 0 ? true : false;
These lines check the category nodes assigned to a post to determine what categories have been assigned.
First, create a new directory called /components/FoodResources and create these three files inside of the directory:
FoodResources.js
index.js
FoodResources.modules.scss
First, set the contents of FoodResources.js to this:
import styles from './FoodResources.module.scss';
export default function FoodResources({recipeName, recipeLink}){
return (
<section className={styles.component}>
<h4>🌯 Cook Along</h4>
<a href={recipeLink}>{recipeName}</a>
</section>
)
}
This code creates our FoodResources component, and imports some our styles and scopes them to the component.
From here, add the following style rules to the FoodResources.modules.scss file:
.component {
h4 {
margin: 2rem 0;
}
}
Then export the component in components/FoodResources/index.js:
export { default as FoodResources } from './FoodResources'
To make our component available, import and export our new FoodResources component from components/index.js:
export { FoodResources } from './FoodResources';
Next, you can create another component called MusicResources that looks almost identical.
First, create a new directory called /components/MusicResources and create these three files inside of the directory:
MusicResources.js
index.js
MusicResources.modules.scss
First, set the contents of MusicResources.js to this:
import styles from './MusicResources.module.scss';
export default function MusicResources({trackTitle, artist, album}){
return (
<section className={styles.component}>
<h4>💿 Jam Along</h4>
<div><i>{trackTitle}</i> by {artist} from the album "{album}"</div>
</section>
)
}
This code creates our MusicResources component, and imports some our styles and scopes them to the component.
From here, add the following style rules to the MusicResources.modules.scss file:
.component {
h4 {
margin: 2rem 0;
}
}
Then export the component in components/MusicResources/index.js:
export { default as MusicResources } from './MusicResources'
To make our component available, import and export our new MusicResources component from components/index.js:
export { MusicResources } from './MusicResources';
Now that you have created both components, you can render them conditionally inside of your template component for a single post.
To display the MusicResources and FoodResources components, first you'll need to update the existing component import in /wp-templates/single.js:
import {
Header,
Footer,
Main,
Container,
EntryHeader,
NavigationMenu,
ContentWrapper,
FeaturedImage,
SEO,
MusicResources,
FoodResources
} from '../components';
You'll want to display these resource components in the main content area below the post content, so to do that you can implement the components as children of the ContentWrapper component:
<ContentWrapper content={content}>
{isFood ?
(<FoodResources recipeName={foodResources.recipeName} recipeLink={foodResources.recipeLink}>
</FoodResources>)
: null }
{isMusic ?
(<MusicResources
trackTitle={sweetMixtape.trackTitle}
artist={sweetMixtape.artist}
album={sweetMixtape.album}
></MusicResources>)
: null }
</ContentWrapper>
Using the isMusic and isFood boolean values, these components will be conditionally rendered based on their category. In a real world application, you'd either want to make these fields required or implement another layer of checking since a post may be of a particular category, but not have these fields defined.
You access a deployable version of this project by running git checkout finished in your terminal.
Atlas is WP Engine's headless WordPress hosting platform, where an app consists of a WordPress install and a Node.js hosting container, powered by modern JAMstack developer workflows.
You can sign up for an Atlas Sandbox Account to deploy your app. The sign up process asks for a credit card, but this does not get charged. It's only for fraud prevention purposes.
This finished branch is ready to be deployed against a WordPress environment. If you create a WordPress installation on WP Engine, you can use the Local Connect feature to push your Local site to the cloud.
You can follow our getting started guide on deploying from your own repository. You will need to set the values for the NEXT_PUBLIC_WORDPRESS_URL and FAUST_SECRET_KEY environment variables during the deploy process.
To get more content from the WP Engine developer relations team, you can read tutorials on our website or watch on our YouTube channel. Our Headless WordPress Developer Roadmap builds on the concepts you learned here today and fills in some background on a few key technologies like React and GraphQL.
If you're on Discord, join the 700+ developers in the headless WordPress Discord community. This is a great place to ask questions, and stay updated on community events like this one.
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