Leonardo Losoviz
Creator of Gato GraphQL, and contributor to several online magazines, including Smashing Magazine and CSS Tricks.
State of the
Leonardo Losoviz
Decoupled Days 2020
It's been exactly 1 year!
How is the project doing?
- How ready is it?
- Has it added new features?
- Has it managed to get a user base?
- Contributors to the repo?
- Financial stability?
In terms of...
Let's find out
How ready is it?
- Current version: 0.7 (Feb 2021)
- Launching new version 0.8 next week! (Support for WP 5.8)
- Launched website graphql-api.com (nice domain!)
- Moved source code to leoloso/PoP (monorepo)
- The plugin is super ready
- The plugin is never ready
- Plan to release version 1.0 in (hopefully) 3 months
- Then, release on wp.org/plugins
Has it added new features?
- Feature-wise, it already has what it needs
- (Persisted queries, custom endpoints, access control, HTTP caching, public/private access mode)
- But, does it actually matter?
- People seem to be mainly using it to power Gatsby
- And Gatsby doesn't care about all these features!
- So I'm currently working on completing the WP schema...
- v0.7 still rather incomplete (no categories, settings, menus)
- v0.8 will complete most of what's missing
Has it managed to get a user base?
- Nothing significant yet
- Why? I believe it is because...
- - it can't be extended yet
- - it's not available on wp.org
- - Gatsby users don't need it
- - commercial interests are too invested on WPGraphQL
- So gotta wait for v1.0, and see how it goes
Contributors to the repo?
- Nops
- The codebase has been refactored a few times, up to v0.8...
- ...and still a bit more to do, up to v1.0
- No guides on extending the schema yet
- Stuck in between WordPress and PHP
- - Scary to non-advanced developers (service containers, PHP transpiling, CMS-agnosticism, scoping)
- - Can't talk much about it in reddit's /r/php <= They hate WP!
- So I'm working on it all by myself
- After v1.0, with plugin being extensible, and guides completed, will hopefully get better (🤞)
Financials
- Financials? What's that?
- With open source? It. Just. Does. Not. Work.
- (At least for me... and I believe 99% of everyone else)
- At u$d 5/month, I'd need hundreds of individual sponsors to make it work out (that's impossible for me to achieve!)
- So I attempted to get a few corporate sponsors
- I proposed to drive traffic to them via my blog (which managed to have a few 1000s visitors) in exchange for the sponsorship
- They express interest... then they don't reply your email anymore, and keep you waiting forever
- Consequence? From now on, no more full open source
- Will launch GraphQL API PRO with lovely features, and a marketplace of extensions
- Persisted queries/etc will remain in GraphQL API though, but all new developments will go to PRO (🤫)
Conclusion?
No conclusion
Life goes on
Everything takes time
There are no shortcuts
See you again in
Decoupled Days 2022?
(hopefully offline!)
😃
Thanks!
👋
Leonardo Losoviz
State of the
State of the GraphQL API for WordPress
By Leonardo Losoviz
State of the GraphQL API for WordPress
It's been exactly one year since launching the GraphQL API for WordPress plugin on Decoupled Days 2020. So, how has it been doing?
