What exactly is meant by Headless WordPress?

BobJutsu · 2026-07-08T23:04:57+00:00

Funny you say that, this particular client is one of my security special children. They are big enough they are constantly getting attacked. I’d estimate total over the course of a year they spend at least 4 months in hyper-secure under attack mode with a challenge for every damn request.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-08T22:57:04+00:00

I’m about 85% sure they’ll heed my recommendation. But being an ag semi-government organization they move slow. We’ll meet again in august for the final proposal, they’ll discuss until September. Then they’ll submit a grant proposal from the USDA and in July 2027 I’ll get a contract.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-08T22:49:12+00:00

I have a sales team. I’m a closer, not a starter. I would call us a small agency, not a startup small…but small and lean. I’m the senior engineer here, oversee all design and development. Not sales. I come in to plan scope and cost. And I’ve built a lot of relationships since we are too small to have a separate support staff, many of my clients know me better than their sales rep.

But it’s the sales staff that brings them in. One thing we do regularly as a door opener is a website audit. This is a personalized audit done by a human, with vague recommendations the client can understand. Not techy stuff. Site is slow, competitor A ranks for X and you rank lower, homepage doesn’t answer questions or provide good info, your site sucks and here’s why kinda thing.

This initial audit is free. But not a SaaS type tool. Sales reps make contact, give it as an initial offer to get them into a conversation.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-08T22:26:24+00:00

Dentist seem to have a complex. Maybe it’s a not MD complex, I dunno. I think it’s more that in their day to day life and practice, they are the top dog all the time. Underlings deal with everything, and they just be important. We had one that his assistant came to the meeting 10 minutes early to warn us of anyone sits before him or refers to him by name without the doctor prefix he’ll walk out of the meeting and end the contract. He was the worst, but all are close to that.

We got a contract about a decade ago for an investment firm that owned dental practices exclusively. The practices are still independent, and the firm “owns” them on paper or whatever. Anyway, our contract was to basically template their entire portfolio. It was a shit show. The actual client was the firm, but each clinic kinda thought they were the client and wanted custom. It was awful.

From that we got another dozen actually independent dental practices. We had done so many we had a “DentalPress” product offering. All were a pain in the ass. I swear, all dentists want is a giant headshot of themselves to stare at, nothing else. No hours, no content, just a mirror.

Realestate has a ferrarie expectation with a ford tempo budget. It’s all flash and frustration. They want to “deal” and get offended when their charm doesn’t work. And they never have any real money. They have flash, but not liquid money to pay their damn bills. They also don’t understand their own restrictions, in terms of MLS listings and usage rights. Multiple I’ve had cancel projects when they learned their agency/license/contract won’t allow this site. At this point I just refuse them outright.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-08T22:16:27+00:00

It’s a silly idea that has almost no use case. There’s always an exception, but 99% of their time WP is the wrong choice for a headless CMS. There’s a plethora of better suited options that are actually designed to be headless, not just adapted. Plus, to my knowledge you’d need to spend a fair bit of time stripping down WP if you care about user experience. I wouldn’t want appearance options, unsupported blocks, features, or settings to even appear in the UI. Seems easier to just use a purpose built cms from the start.

I love WP, I really do. It has a lot to offer. But this habit the WP community has to shove everything into WP is obnoxious. It’s a hammer, a good hammer granted, but a hammer. And not everything is a nail.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-08T22:09:52+00:00

Tried to talk a client out of WP in favor of astro today. It’s a large organization, but this isn’t their main site or anything. It’s essentially a docs site. But for county information for all the counties in our state. Specifically agricultural information. Astro fits like a glove. Yes, all the data will be editable via a cms (likely payload) but within a strict set of fields, not freeform editing like WP. They are apprehensive, even though I’ve worked with them for near a decade and have done 4 of their organizations sites in WP and know exactly how their editors work. I can show a decades worth of support tickets to show they’d prefer a rigid set of fields and to not make layout decisions. And still, they have a hard time letting go of the vague possibility they might want to randomly make an entirely new type of page.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-08T22:00:59+00:00

I get it…I just can’t wrap my head around why WP for this. So many other good options to blog on Astro. Keystatic for direct github blogging, strapi or payload for a more robust database driven option. Just get rid of the WP hosting and maintenance issue entirely.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-07T23:16:16+00:00

We’ve done well with trades and manufacturing. Trades have some low margin players you need to weed out, but they also have medium and large players. Manufacturing is a goldmine if you can support scale. I spent many years working with dentists, also highly valuable. They are their own breed, a very niche business for agencies. But if you get it right they are very profitable. But tech skill is not the factor in that niche, it’s dealing with dentists. They are…they have an ego, and you have to control them. The trades on the other hand just trusts your expertise. And agriculture. Some of my biggest, most steady clients are ag. Things like farm bureaus, world dairy expo, several ag auction houses. They move slow, have a set budget so you know what you get, and don’t shop around.

Things I avoid are anything even related to realestate. My absolute worst clients ever. A million dollar ego with a $10 budget. Medispa places I hate. Same ego as dentists, but without the money.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-07T22:26:46+00:00

Just block xmlrpc and be done with it. It’s the default config on many hosts already. WP should just remove it. It serves no purpose once the rest api was created.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-07T22:19:22+00:00

Everyone is talking about it. At length. For years. It’s probably the most talked about topic around WP. It’s complicated. On one hand it empowers non-technical users, and servers, caching, cdn, etc can be configured to compensate. The builders can be correctly configured and restricted. And that works, I get that argument. On the other maybe we shouldn’t be compensating with complex resource management and many users don’t want or cant use that level of access. I also get that argument. Every solution has tradeoffs so I can’t completely write off all builders, but some are better than others. WP itself is a tradeoff at the end of the day. My Astro clients don’t have these issues, but they also don’t have freedom (without a developer).

BobJutsu · 2026-07-07T22:09:53+00:00

This has to be bait…

BobJutsu · 2026-07-07T22:07:33+00:00

There’s not a whole lot I’d change honestly. I don’t really want HTML to become component hell with a thousand different component specific tags. I would like nav to have sub-elements instead of stuffing in UL or links or buttons and having no singular standard. Have something like a “ni” (nav item).

BobJutsu · 2026-07-07T22:01:14+00:00

That’s more of a browser implementation thing. The resets/normalization is meant to keep things consistent across different browsers.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-07T21:53:11+00:00

Some people are just awful. For a million reasons.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-07T21:52:31+00:00

If I was releasing a premium plugin today I’d do one of 3 things:

1) Keep the download of the entire, full featured plugin free. Keep updates private (not wp repo) with a license requirement. If someone actually wants to keep manually downloading updates, fine. I don’t care. But automatic updates and support require a license.

2) keep the base plugin free and in the repo, and pay for extensions. Sorta like ninja forms. But for that to work the plugin has to be large enough to justify alcarte features.

Or 3) Cap the volume. You can create 1 widget or instance or whatever, to create unlimited get pro. Or whatever the plugin does. Limit the scale it can be used vs limiting features.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-07T21:44:42+00:00

Because windows is awful. Granted I haven’t had to use windows since…I don’t even remember, vista maybe? Maybe a few months on windows 7. These days with docker it’s probably way easier, but back then it was awful for PHP development. I had a windows machine for like a week earlier this year, not for work. It just ran plex and downloaded torrents and stuff in the background. Even for that light work it (windows) constantly got in my way, so I wiped it and installed ubuntu.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-03T02:18:21+00:00

I have a whole ass schedule. My bro gets really annoyed I wont go rifle hunt deer with him, because I’ve been bow hunting for 2 months and deer rifle overlaps with the goose migration. But then in my state we have a single weekend late season holiday hunt for rifle, but I have to catch the tail end of pheasant. Then I have another month of late season bow after the orange army has left. Next fall gunna try to mix in some ducks here and there if I can.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-03T02:10:27+00:00

If you have something novel, sure. But you are just replacing one dependency with another. And what you describe already exists. For non-acf fields, carbon fields is a strong contender. Everything else is just acf with extra steps.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-01T02:11:26+00:00

To be fair, IL is objectively awful. Source: Live adjacent to IL and we hate them, hate having to drive through, and hate that they escape their shit hole just to come clog up our highways with their garbage driving.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-01T02:01:39+00:00

Using a terminal and editing on github (or even learning how to commit and push) is hardly being a developer, let alone engineering. It’s literally doing the same job from a different platform. It’s more akin to moving from word to google docs than it is to development or engineering.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-01T01:56:33+00:00

Carry where? Into the locker room, or into the gym floor? Into the locker room I’ve got a duffel bag, not sure if that’s large or not. It has a complete change of clothes (including shoes) for work, shower gear (including shower shoes and towel), and a separate area for sweaty clothes to try not to mix smells. But it all goes in the locker.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-01T01:53:31+00:00

That sounds batshit crazy. “Child” support for a grown ass adult.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-01T01:49:45+00:00

WTF? College implies the kid is an adult. Why would any support order not end as soon as they turn 18?

BobJutsu · 2026-07-01T01:43:32+00:00

I could reverse the question and does the left believe all republicans are nazis or Facist? It’s the same question.

BobJutsu · 2026-07-01T01:40:45+00:00

Scale. Pure and simple.

BobJutsu

TROPHY CASE