October 23, 2023 — The maturing and widespread adoption of the Block Editor has coincided with the growth of headless WordPress.

The Block Editor provides an unrivalled WYSIWYG experience – where content teams can provide richer, more creative content for their end-users. Headless provides unrivalled performance and provides a great Developer experience (DXP).

But until now, they have rarely come together. Headless often means a huge compromise for content creation teams – requiring a ‘leap of faith’ – where the display settings are abstracted into a few meta fields in the backend. Creativity and flexibility are constrained and they’ve been left behind by the WYSIWYG revolution.

No longer. We’re going to look at a major enterprise project (mecum.com) where we build the ‘Block Editor Bridge’ – where the Block Editor feeds directly into UI Components in the frontend app. We’ll look at new, exciting initiatives from VIP and WPEngine and how you can implement the same approach in your next project.

The Headless Block Editor is the new gold standard – the best backend and frontend experience – and it’s here.

June 27, 2022 — Find out how Blocks Patterns have revolutionized the approach to WordPress site design. See some recent experiments and learn more about tools.

October 5, 2018 — Key takeaways:

The API liberates data outside of WordPress and projects like Gutenberg – breaking content into modular content blocks – will change the way WordPress considers data relationships.
The API is driving a new Enterprise Stack – with each element the industry leader in its field – including WordPress as the fast moving publishing solution.
Decoupling the front – using technologies like React – & decoupling the back – using technologies like Elasticsearch – begs the question: Why continue using WordPress? The answer is that clients, content teams, editors & authors all over the world have built a passion for WordPress for its ease of use and friendly interface. This strength should never be underestimated.

July 9, 2018 — As the WordPress API matures, this is an important moment to take stock and consider the best use-cases. We’ll briefly take a bird-eye view of the API, before deep-diving into different ways the API has been deployed. We’ll see an examples of the API as an integration tool for running dual CMSs, as a public-facing queryable dataset, as a big data visualisation tool and as a way to share large sets of data. Along the way, I’ll share ways to make your API implementation more efficient – and share some of the pitfalls and mistakes we’ve made. We’ll take a look at decoupling both the frontend and backend of WordPress – and answer the obvious question – why continuing using WordPress?

January 29, 2018 — Three days before the deadline and the launch of a national TV campaign – Sean’s boss turned to him and said: “I don’t think we can do this.”

Just six weeks earlier the team at Pragmatic had landed a huge API project. ITV, The National Lottery & The British Olympic Association had come together to plan and deliver Britain’s biggest ever sports day: I am Team GB. As their chosen WordPress partners, they had to get it right.

So how did it go? What did they learn along the way? And what would they do differently if they did it again? Sean will guide the audience through the different pieces of the puzzle – things they predicted, (and the things they didn’t). We will explore:

– The inner workings of an enterprise level API project
– The pressures and challenges of a tight, immovable deadline (the Olympics!)
– The creativity needed to face new challenges
– And most of all, the successes and learnings we can see looking back on it now.

The project helped a million people get off the sofa and get involved in sport that day – and we’ll look at how, with millions of people hitting the site, WordPress didn’t break a sweat.

November 11, 2017 — Building a partnership takes an investment of time and energy for both the client & delivery agency. Earlier this year, Sage embarked on an ambitious programme to rebuild its entire online presence. Part of the plan was for a global WordPress multi-site.

This will be a discussion, co-presented by Sage (the client) and Pragmatic (the agency), which will provide a 360 view of a large WordPress project, covering both the technical and non-technical aspects. We’ll talk about the steps you can take when facing a hugely challenging project – facing up to tight timelines and translating multiple desires into a deliverable programme of work. We’ll look at how you can maximise your efficiency during production, leveraging the core functionality that WordPress provides and building on top of it, and how planning the architecture with an eye on the future can be the key to building partnerships. We’ll hear about the project from the client’s perspective as Sage will talk about their experiences – and from an agency perspective, delivering the work.

There were plenty of challenges along the journey on both sites – creating a custom WP API in a matter of days, training internal staff on new tools and migrating thousands of posts. But most of all, we’ll look at how we focused on building a partnership – creating trust and efficiency which benefited both sides.