Using Frontity w/ other Blog Sources (like Blogger)

There are some other blog sources that, I think, could be used (instead of Wordpress) w/ Frontity.

“Blogger” for example have an API that could be used to retrieve the info (in a similar way Frontity can retrieve info from Wordpress.com): https://developers.google.com/blogger/docs/3.0/using

Would it be possible? Would it make sense? Would it be an interesting feature for Frontity to allow different “sources” besides Wordpress?

Hey @juanma great question, I’m sure there will be people discovering Frontity asking themselves the same thing.

As a company we have the goal of positioning Frontity as the reference framework to build React Frontends for WordPress. There are already other great frontend frameworks like Next or Gatsby that are not specialised on a single backend, we consider that the best way to create a framework that brings something new to the table and adds value to the developers is by focusing on a more specific use case, WordPress in our case.

In addition, the framework is the result of almost two years working with WordPress publishers helping them create React frontends for their sites, so the design of the framework is very influenced by how WordPress works.

So I don’t see creating source packages for other backends becoming a priority in the near future for us as a company.

Absolutely.

As I said, It’s not really aligned with our goals and strategy, so we wouldn’t give priority to this development. But if it makes sense for someone else, they could create their own source package and replace ours.

"@frontity/wp-source" is already a package, so it could be replaced by a different source. In any case, I’m sure that the @development-team would be able to give a better explanation of whats are the implications of replacing wp-source with a different source package.

1 Like

As @Pablo has already said, it would be possible but would require at the very least a custom handler and possibly some changes in the logic of wp-source :slight_smile:

1 Like

Adding support for other APIs in @frontity/wp-source is not the way this is designed to work in Frontity. Instead, people wanting to connect to other APIs should create their own source packages. In the case of blogger, people would have to create a blogger-source package.

But @mmczaplinski is right in one thing: Right now there is a lot of logic in wp-source which can’t be reused in other source packages. One of the goals of version 2 of source is moving all that logic to the main @frontity/source package and use the specific implementations (@frontity/wp-source, @frontity/wp-graphql-source, blogger-source…) only for the handlers. That way creating new source packages will be way easier than it is now.

In this version 2, I’m also working on allowing packages connecting to different API to live together in a single Frontity site. This means that if a Frontity site is using @frontity/wp-graphql-source to get their main posts/pages from WPGraphQL and want to add a package that connects to the REST API like for example @frontity/wp-comments everything would work just fine.

As we are currently only focused on WordPress, releasing an official package for blogger won’t make sense, but I think it will make sense to release packages for:

  • @frontity/wp-graphql-source: to get the data using WPGraphQL.
  • @frontity/wp-frontity-source: to get the data from a custom Frontity endpoint of the REST API (something like /frontity/v1/...).

Both packages are up for discussion, of course :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Both blogger and wordpress.com are free. But blogger Text editor is quite basic comparing to Gutenberg, So I think add blogger support isn’t a good idea at all.