When fetching data for a component, PoP allows to point to an external domain. Until now, the external site had to have the same components installed as the origin site, to guarantee that the response would be what was expected by the origin site. Undoubtedly, this was less than ideal.

This is solved now, and very elegantly: whenever a component fetches data from an external site, it automatically generates the URL to query, including all the fields that need be retrieved. Similar to GraphQL, this request will fetch only the required data, and because it is automatically generated by the application, there are no possibilities of manual errors from creating the query, and if any field is updated or a new one introduced or removed, the query is automatically upgraded too. The automatically generated query looks like this (assuming, in this case, that nextapi.getpop.org is the external site).

Through this feature, PoP sites will be able to share data effortlessly. The developer will not even need to code a query to fetch data, but simply arranging all modules inside each other will do. PoP takes care of the rest.

As usual, enjoy!

In our previous blog post we described that we were migrating PoP code into components. While doing so, we are abstracting the whole code away from WordPress, so that it can be powered by other frameworks, such as Laravel. The task involves finding all the references to WordPress code inside the PoP codebase, and move that code behind the implementation of an interface. Because the interface can be implemented for any CMS, we will then be able to install PoP using any framework.

This task is time consuming, so we are working on it, however we hope it will be finished within a couple of weeks, after which we will finally start making components available.

Stay tuned!

PoP has historically been called a “framework”. The reason for this is that, having started as a project for WordPress, its architecture expected to manage the whole website. Then, if you wanted to run PoP, it had to be a PoP website. It was an all or nothing situation.

However, this situation will soon be drastically improved: We are currently migrating PoP from a monorepo into a set of components, each of them hosted under its own repo, and all of them managed and tied together through Composer. The components can be installed independently of each other and, quite importantly, they will be CMS-agnostic. Having an architecture based on components, PoP is not expecting to take over the site any longer: components be added into any website to improve its capabilities, providing specific features (such as the component-based API)

Our aim is to release the components providing an implementation for WordPress and, in the future, provide an implementation for October CMS (given the availability of time and man power for the task). We expect to start releasing the first components around May 2019.

PoP is now compliant with PHP Standards Recommendations PSR-1: Basic Coding Standard and PSR-2: Coding Style Guide. This involved a huge refactoring of the whole codebase, renaming all functions from their snake case form (such as get_modules) into their camel case equivalent (getModules). As usual, enjoy!

Together with the release of the PoP API, we announce a major feature: the PoP API has been completely decoupled from the overall application, so it can be used as a standalone API to power any application, using a PoP theme or any standard WordPress theme.

For instance, we have deployed a site under https://nextapi.getpop.org, which uses the default WordPress 5.0 theme “Twenty Nineteen”:

If, however, we add parameter ouput=json to the URL, we get the data through the PoP API:

This makes it possible to use PoP purely as an API to fetch or post data, alongside any other theme out there.

Enjoy!

We have started releasing the new PoP. This is the first time ever that PoP can be installed without fear of it breaking up: originally the codebase was not split into plugins, so if certain plugins were not activated, everything broke, greatly impairing the chance of developers being able to use it (for which the project barely has 50+ stars on GitHub). After 10 months of heavy work and tears, it started being ready. Hurray!

To download the new PoP API, simply head to the repository on GitHub and follow the instructions.

The overall migration is not finished though: only the API layer is ready, the rendering layers (for both client-side and server-side) are still under development, so they will be released in stages as soon as they are finished. We expect everything to be up by 2nd quarter 2019.

This is a major release: The new PoP API is fully based on components (we believe this is a primer among APIs, we’ve never seen or heard of one before), and will be able to offer unique capabilities, making it extremely easy to build any kind of website, from simple sites to decentralized social networks.

We will keep blogging about the new capabilities alongside each new release. Enjoy!