But wanted to ask, how we go about to building a front end web app (SaaS) leveraging WP beyond Post & Pages, like creating some form of a dashboard, menu’s, tables, etc?
There are various handy DBtable plugins for WP, that do help on the WP side, but the whole idea of building a front end (as I am concerned) is to leave behind the typical WP UI/UX experience for users, to build something more like a dashboard/panel like web app that can scale and use WP as a serving entity.
Do we need to confirm if plugins used on the WP side have some specifics before choosing what we deploy as a plugin to accommodate the requirements of Frontity (even if today Frontity has no support for that specific plugin) and somehow hook into such with coding in React?
Would like to see what Frontity can do (examples maybe?) beyond what I have seen, that appears to be to the extent as I have mentioned for posts/pages only generated content.
Not sure if I understood your case properly, feel free to correct me if I am missing something. I think this other web another user is building (still developing it) could be something similar to what you are looking for. You could keep using WordPress for managing your content (pages, posts, custom post types, etc), have users authentication if needed and build also your own app or dashboard, everything built with Frontity and React in the same project.
Frontity is meant to let you keep managing your content in WordPress while making really easy to build your frontend using React instead of the common PHP themes. From there, you can build whatever you want with React and Frontity.
Regarding the plugins, it really depends on each case.
Backend plugins: Plugins that just alter your backend and don’t interact with the frontend at all aren’t affected by Frontity. They are usually plugins that improve your admin dashboard, security or let you download data in a different way, like invoices for example.
And between the plugins that modify something on the frontend, there are also differences:
Plugins that work out of the box because they just add more info to the content or another field that is already being fetched by Frontity. This could be for example a plugin that adds info at the end of the content. As Frontity is already fetching the content, it would be added also in the REST API and it would work out of the box.
Plugins that are compatible with the REST API but need a Frontity package to work properly. Here we could include plugins that show the data in the API but need a Frontity package to fetch it or plugins that add info to the content but need their logic to be readapted to React, as it could be the Contact Form 7 plugin.
Plugins that don’t show the data in the API so they would need another WP plugin to show it and a Frontity package to fetch it (unless you include it on the content or another fetched field).
Plugins that load too many css and javascript so it’s just better to replicate the logic on React, creating directly a Frontity package or use another npm package to replace them.
But the way, when I say that Frontity packages are needed I mean that if you don’t want to do it yourself, you’ll need a package. However, just like in WordPress, you can always code your own logic to fit your needs.
I hope you find this information useful and please, let us know if you have any more questions
We know that learning React from scratch could be overwhelming, so we’ve summed up the few concepts necessary to master Frontity at our documentation. If you prefer, you can test it directly from your browser using Codesandbox.
We’d love to know more about what you are trying to build, keep us posted please!
