Decoupling your frontend architecture from WordPress has typically relied on the REST API paired with WPGraphQL as the primary data source for hydrating your components. In this session we'll explore an ongoing project which needed a different paradigm to facilitate its transition to headless, and how ElasticSearch helped ease some of the early pain points by liberating the frontend from WordPress's backend altogether, allowing us to run applications in any context.
We'll reveal what we learned:
- Building React components with GraphQL and custom resolvers leveraging the official ElasticSearch Javascript Client
- Crafting custom archive / collection experiences with search queries and aggregations
- Using WordPress template hierarchy and React Router for supporting taxonomy folder structures as an intermediate step in incrementally separating the presentation layer from the backend.
- Prepping for the future – AI chatbot integration