2023 was another year of exciting growth for Atlas, WP Engine’s all-in-one platform for headless WordPress.
Introduced in 2021, Atlas provides a complete headless stack designed to increase agency efficiency, developer freedom, and brand impact. While initial post-release efforts focused primarily on fundamental goals, the Atlas team plans to expand its scope in his 2023 year, refining the developer experience and upgrading tools to be more user-friendly. We have embarked on various functional enhancements aimed at achieving this goal.
We are happy to share all the details with you. This article details the major updates to Atlas in 2023, shares some of our customer successes, and provides essential resources for developers starting their headless journey. Let’s dive in!
Make your blueprint better
Announced at DE{CODE} 2022, Atlas Blueprints provides users with a preconfigured, easy-to-install environment that serves as a starting point for learning and building headless technology stacks.
In 2023, we’re incorporating more builder tools into the Atlas Blueprints experience. For example, BigCommerce and Shopify Blueprints have become invaluable to headless ecommerce developers who want to embrace composable commerce without rebuilding their traditional stores.
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), WPGraphQL, and Faust.js are also seamlessly integrated into Atlas Blueprints, making it easier than ever for developers to get their headless WordPress projects up and running.
Innovation made simple
In 2023, we made significant enhancements to the entire Atlas platform, solidifying our position as the leader in headless WordPress technology.
By focusing on enhancements to individual components, the Atlas team has successfully improved the platform as a whole, making it more intuitive and user-friendly while fostering innovation and simplifying the development process. Did.
In 2023, improvements to the Atlas platform include:
- Integration with Bitbucket and GitLab provides Atlas users with a wide choice of Git vendors and great flexibility and compatibility with a variety of development workflows.
- Build notification. Atlas now allows you to enhance communication by posting comments on your repository’s pull request page after a build is complete. This feature supports multiple notification settings including email, Slack, and WP Engine user portal.
- Access logs created for your Atlas project to improve troubleshooting. Developers can request up to 20 access logs every 24 hours per Atlas environment.
- System environment variables. It allows you to influence the behavior of your web applications and provides a way to dynamically adjust configurations without changing your codebase. Each value can be changed based on your specific Atlas environment.
moreover, faust.jsa framework designed to streamline the development of headless WordPress sites, Added a unique set of extensions.
As a JavaScript framework, Faust.js has become a valuable tool for both WordPress and JavaScript developers, and recent updates aim to simplify and enhance the development experience for both. Also:
- Introducing the WordPress toolbar for headless + new TypeScript types. This toolbar improves the workflow for content authors by making the headless backend seamlessly resemble the backend of a traditional WordPress site. The team also created his two new TypeScript types (FaustPlugin and FaustHooks) that can be used to type check Faust plugins.
- New bug fixes (Windows etc.) + Enable debug mode. This can be triggered by adding her FAUST_DEBUG = true in the .env.local file. This new mode gives developers deeper insight into what Faust is doing behind the scenes, including debugging remote calls.
- Creating the React-Gutenberg Bridge. In 2023, we’ve made great strides in meeting the needs of both content creators who prefer WYSIWYG editors and developers who want to take advantage of the full potential of headless architectures.
- Add 10 of the most popular WordPress blocks to Atlas’ all-new block library. These blocks allow you to quickly start using the most important features and serve as a sample set that you can use to build your own block library filled with blocks that best suit your site and needs.
- Next.js App Router Support is a new model for building applications using React’s latest features such as server components, suspenseful streaming, and server actions.
- Migrating Faust Blueprints to ACF allows developers to more easily leverage existing ACF content structures and take advantage of the most powerful content solutions in the WordPress ecosystem.
- Build a showcase page to showcase Faust.js builds created by members of your community.
- Create a path to convert existing React components into WordPress blocks, improving the workflow for developers coming to WordPress from another CMS.
Connect with the community
Another focus for the Atlas team in 2023 was educating and engaging the larger community of developers interested in making the leap to headless.
Building a community is one of the most important ways to support open source developers, because collaboration is the best way to learn and grow.
Our Developer Relations (DevRel) team has created a treasure trove of both written and YouTube content that is popular among headless developers. He has over 4,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel alone. Short-form content covers everything from headless image optimization to building new apps with Faust.js, WPGraphQL, and ACF.
The Faust.js team has been steadily documenting the process on the Faust.js blog, and just last month we moved project management to GitHub, allowing us to respond to issues and pull requests faster and more efficiently than ever before. became.
In our Discord channel, the team has been actively answering developer questions from over 1,600 community members and fostering discussions about some of the most important topics regarding headless WordPress.
All Atlas teams are continually connecting with developers experimenting with these products and seeking feedback. So, please send any questions or general feedback to the Faust.js team via the website or to the broader Atlas community on Discord.
Altus success
We’ve already seen a number of agile, high-performance site applications launched using Atlas, and 2023 has produced some of the most impressive projects to date.
Agency professionals at Wide Eye Creative used Atlas to build a medical directory site. The site includes a membership platform for healthcare providers, a publishing platform for healthcare resources, and an extensible API that enables robust provider search capabilities, all while providing lightning-fast speeds for end users. We are realizing this. .
Alameda County Food Bank used Atlas to update its Food Now program’s online presence while staying connected to data from its existing CRM and improving mobile accessibility for users in low-bandwidth areas.
When Gunnar Roofing approached Click Here Labs to improve the customer experience by creating a seamless, user-friendly platform to get and purchase roofing materials quotes, the agency chose Atlas . The result is a site with improved performance and caching, and added features such as 3D visualization tools.
These are just a few of the projects built on Atlas last year, and we’re excited to see what 2024 will bring.
What’s next for Atlas?
Atlas never stops innovating, and we have lofty goals for 2024.
AI is a concern for many developers, and the Atlas team is no exception. One area the Atlas team is focused on is Smart Search, WP Engine’s scalable and intuitive WordPress search solution.
The Atlas team has already taken steps to improve Smart Search with AI enhancements, including new features detailed in DE{CODE} 2024.
Atlas also continues to support many frameworks including React, js, Astro, Next.js, and more, delivering on our promise of incorporating all the best features into our premium headless WordPress framework, Faust.js. Masu.
All of our team’s current and future efforts are focused on one goal: future-proofing WordPress and keeping the open source community thriving.
connect with us
If you have feedback or questions for the Atlas team, connect with the rest of the team and community in our headless Discord channel, or check out State of Atlas 2024.
Or, if you want to try headless development yourself, sign up for a free Sandbox account and start tinkering.