Why does the Frontity community and forums suck since Automattic takeover

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#1

Wondering why the forums have gone so quiet since the acquisition. When I first started my project using Frontity for the first time last year, the forum was source of great information and help. It now seems like questions go unanswered forever, at least most of mine do. I’m still new to the platform and feel a platform and product like this is only as good as community around it.

It’ll put me off using it in future projects as it’s hard to get help and information.

Any way it’d be great to hear others thoughts on this.

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#2

Agree with you
I’m new to web developpment and quick google search quickly pointed towards frontity being great to combine wordpress + react, which for a newbie like me looked awesome

getting started with the most basic stuffs was really easy, but as soon as you start getting into more specific use cases it’s getting really hard and forums are really quiet indeed

however, considering how beginner i am, i am quite scared to try something like next.js and have to do all the routing and setup etc by myself :frowning:

#3

Hey @mckenna.niall and @alexis.doroszkiewicz , thank you for sharing your concerns.

It is true that the forum is quieter now. As you may know, our team shifted the main focus to working on WordPress and the full site editing developer experience and, unfortunately, we don’t have the bandwidth to provide support or commit our time to the continued development of the framework. However, Frontity Framework is still living as an open source project.

While there aren’t many of them, we appreciate those contributors who continue to help others and share knowledge here. We know that there are other folks and agencies still interested in using the framework and some of them making contributions. So, although less active, we believe the forum (along with other learning resources) can still be a good place to find Frontity-related answers and solutions. At least for the time being.

#4

This is sad. Frontity is such a great project with fantastic documentation. You could really see the attention to detail and care with which it was created.

What was even the purpose of Automattic purchasing Frontity? Was it just a way to acquire more developers that had skills relevant to their new goals? Or a way to slowly kill a project that would be competition with the new goals/roadmap?

Some heads up on this would have been good instead of just the generic excited blog post about being acquired by Automattic. Because now me and others are experiencing dead websites due to what looks to be a lack of maintenance on Frontity. And now I’m not confident we will be able to get help in a timely matter or at all.

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#5

@techno_cowgirl This is concerning…

I just made a website with frontity, is it doomed to break even if I freeze packages dependencies to the currently working versions ?

#6

I agree, I think the most annoying thing was that there was a blog post and then just radio silence.

Anyway, @alexis.doroszkiewicz I don’t believe there are any issues with the Frontity package. Though github’s dependabot is constantly flagging security weaknesses with my recently published Frontity project and trying to fix those via dependabot broke my Frontity project so in the end I had to roll back and leave it as it is. Something to watch out for.

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#7

Thanks for sharing your concerns, I’m sure we could have done a better job of communicating the reasons behind the acquisition. Frontity’s co-founder @luisherranz published a thread on twitter explaining all this a bit more: https://twitter.com/luisherranz/status/1437354344844832776 I hope it helps answer your questions.

#8

Thanks for coming back to us Pablo.

I do have a question though. With no further updates to Frontity, is there a risk that an existing project could break in the future?

#9

There have been updates :slight_smile:

The software itself won’t break. It relies on WordPress REST API v2 (the current version), which is stable.
Integrations with external tools could break. For example, our Vercel builder (which broke a couple of weeks ago, and it’s now working again), the integration with Yoast, etc.

Newer versions of React can bring new functionalities that React libraries can use, and those libraries may not work in the future if Frontity is not using the latest React version. The same may happen for Webpack plugins.

#10

Hi! I’ve seen the same, the forum is very innactive this year. Does anyone know how to install a third part dependencies in frontity, as npm react spring, or any library?

I’ve tried to install in my own theme but it appear a problem as React is running twice or i don’t know, but couldn’t make it work and I have made a project that i can’t go backwards and have to finish it anyhow.

Thank you

#11

@nicobava96 can you add this problem to it’s own post in the Get Help community and ideally post a link to your code on github? I’ll try to help you.

#12

Hi, yes, glad you help me.

In deed what I need to know is how to install react-spring, or npm i react-scroll-horizontal and put to work the dependency in Mars Theme, for example.

I followed this tutorial but I couldn’t make it work properly: How To Use Frontity To Create A Headless WordPress Theme With React - YouTube

Minute 10.47.

If you can help me how to use third part dependencies it would help very much. Thank youu

#13

Here I opened this post:

Where i described the problem.