Restoring previews to WordPress with Gatsby

Decoupling applications comes with a major drawback we don’t often discuss: removing a legacy CMS’s frontend requires teams to sometimes abandon built-in support for editorial features they depend on. The biggest example of this is live previews. An author writing a new post, as well as the editor reviewing that post, can rely on WordPress’s built-in previews in their daily work. Gatsby is a popular frontend set up to consume WordPress’s API, but we still need a way to preserve this Live Preview functionality for these teams. In this talk, we’ll take a brief look at some of the recent changes in ‘gatsby-source-wordpress’, and then we’ll see how placing the two apps on a single Platform.sh project - along with a few modifications to redefine WordPress’s previews - can restore this workflow for our editorial teams, even with a decoupled frontend.

Attendees should have some familiarity with decoupling with Gatsby and/or WordPress, and they will come away with some appreciation for the effect decoupling has on editorial teams.