So today I officially launched this new website after spending the last couple of days ironing out a few bugs. It has been a journey making it with newer technologies and not the usual WP stack but it has been rewarding to see things like great results in PageSpeed insights and great comments from my peers. I’ll go into this more in later blog posts (as well as sharing the code for the site) but here are some different technologies/libraries I used to make this:

• WordPress as an API for posts and some pages
• WPGraphQL in WordPress
  – used to retrieve posts and comments
  – mutation for adding comments
• Advanced Custom Fields to add some additional fields in WP
• React
• NextJS
• Contact form made with a serverless function run on AWS Lambda that calls AWS SES (I know I could have just created the function in the NextJS API but I wanted to try out Lambda)

There were some fun challenges, for example figuring out the hierarchal comment structure and how to display it from a flat input, and some frustrating ones (a very tricky one with – of all things – CSS and how NextJS moves to the top of a page on route change).

I’m going to make this the first in a series of posts on how to do this same thing. Maybe it’ll help other people looking to push past the usual uses of WordPress and explore a new world with React, NextJS, and static site generation.