2023 was another year of exciting growth for Atlas, WP Engine’s all-in-one platform for headless WordPress.
Introduced in 2021, Atlas offers a full headless stack designed for agency efficiency, developer freedom and enhanced brand impact. While initial post-launch efforts focused mostly on foundational goals, the Atlas team broadened its scope in 2023, launching a series of improvements aimed at improving the developer experience and upgrading the tools to be more user-friendly.
We’re excited to share all the details with you, and in this article, we’ll break down major updates to Atlas in 2023, highlight some of our customer successes, and include important resources for developers starting their headless journey. Let’s dive in!
Making blueprints better
Released DE{CODE} 2022, Atlas Blueprints provides users with preconfigured, easy-to-install environments that serve as a starting point for learning and creating with a headless technology stack.
In 2023, we integrated even more authoring tools into the Atlas Blueprints experience. BigCommerce and Shopify Blueprints, for example, have become invaluable to brainless ecommerce developers who want to embrace synthetic commerce without rebuilding their legacy stores.
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), WPGraphQL and Faust.js have also been seamlessly integrated into Atlas Blueprints, making it easier than ever for developers to get WordPress projects up and running headless.
Simplifying Innovation
2023 also saw major improvements to the Atlas platform as a whole, strengthening its position as the leader in WordPress headless technology.
By focusing on improvements to individual components, the Atlas team successfully elevated the entire platform, making it more intuitive and user-friendly, while promoting innovation and simplifying the development process.
In 2023, Atlas platform enhancements included:
- Integration with Bitbucket and GitLab to give Atlas users a wider choice of Git vendors and more flexibility and compatibility with different development workflows.
- Create alerts. Atlas now offers improved communication by posting comments on a repository’s Pull Request page after the build is complete. This feature supports multiple notification preferences, including email, Slack, and the WP Engine user portal.
- Access the logs generated for Atlas projects to improve troubleshooting. Developers can request up to 20 access logs per Atlas environment every 24 hours.
- System environment variables, which can affect the behavior of the web application, providing a way to dynamically adjust its parameters without changing the code base. Each value can be modified based on the specific Atlas environment.
Additionally, Faust.jsa framework designed to streamline headless WordPress site development, has seen its own set of improvements.
As a JavaScript framework, Faust.js has become a valuable tool for both WordPress developers and JavaScript developers, and recent updates aim to simplify and improve the development experience for both. This includes:
- Introducing the WordPress Toolbar for Headless Type + New TypeScript. The toolbar improves the workflow of content creators by making a headless backend seamlessly resemble that of a traditional WordPress site. The team also created two new TypeScript types (FaustPlugin and FaustHooks) that can be used to type Faust control plugins.
- Enable new bug fixes (eg Windows) + Debug mode that can be enabled by adding FAUST_DEBUG=true to the .env.local file. This new feature gives developers deeper insight into what Faust is doing behind the scenes, including debugging for remote calls and more.
- Creating the React-Gutenberg Bridge, which, in 2023, made huge strides in meeting the needs of both content creators who prefer a WYSIWYG editor and developers who want to take full advantage of the headless architecture.
- Adding ten of the most popular WordPress blocks to a brand new block library for Atlas. These blocks get you started quickly with the most important features and serve as an example set that you can use to build your own block library filled with blocks that are most suitable for your site and needs.
- Introducing Next.js App Router Support, a new model for building apps using React’s latest features, such as server components, suspended streaming, and server actions.
- Moving Faust Blueprints to ACF, which allows developers to make use of existing ACF content structures much more easily and take advantage of the most powerful content solution in the WordPress ecosystem.
- Created a showcase page to showcase Faust.js builds created by community members.
- Create a path to convert existing React components to WordPress blocks, improving workflows for developers coming to WordPress from another CMS.
Community Connection
Another focus for the Atlas team in 2023 was education and connecting with a larger community of developers interested in making the leap to headless.
Community building is one of the most important ways we empower 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’s popular among developer geeks—the YouTube channel alone has over 4,000 subscribers! Short-form content covers everything from headless image optimization to building a new app using Faust.js, WPGraphQL, and ACF.
The Faust.js team has been consistently documenting their process on the Faust.js blog, and just last month, they moved project management to GitHub, allowing them to respond to issues and pull requests faster and more efficiently than ever before.
In our Discord channel, the team has also been active in answering developer questions from over 1,600 members of our community and facilitating discussions on some of the most important topics around headless WordPress.
All Atlas-related teams are constantly connected and soliciting feedback from developers experimenting with these products, so be sure to send questions and general feedback to the Faust.js team via their website or to the wider Atlas community on Discord.
Altas Success
We’ve already seen dozens of flexible, high-performing website apps developed with Atlas, and 2023 brought some of the most impressive projects to date!
The company’s experts at Wide Eye Creative created a healthcare directory site using Atlas, which includes a membership platform for healthcare providers, a publishing platform for health resources, and an extensible API to enable powerful provider search functionality, all achieving blazing speeds for end users.
Alameda County Food Bank used Atlas to revamp its Food Now program’s online presence while maintaining a connection 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 their customer experience by creating a seamless and user-friendly platform for receiving roofing quotes and making purchases, the company chose Atlas. The result was a site with improved performance and caching capabilities, as well as additional functionality, including a 3D visualization tool.
These are just a few of the projects we’ve seen being built at Atlas over the last year, and we’re so excited to see what’s to come in 2024!
What’s next for Atlas?
Innovation never stops at Atlas and we have lofty goals for 2024.
AI is on the minds of many developers, and the Atlas team is no exception. One area where the Atlas team is targeting is Smart Search, WP Engine’s scalable, intuitive WordPress search solution.
The Atlas team is already taking steps to improve Smart Search with AI enhancements, including new features that we’ll discuss in detail at DE{CODE} 2024.
Atlas will also continue to support multiple frameworks including React,js, Astro, Next.js and more to fulfill our promise to bring all the best features to our premium headless WordPress framework, Faust.js.
All of our team’s current efforts and all the work to come is focused on one goal: to keep WordPress future-proof and to keep the open source community thriving!
Connect with us
If you have feedback or questions for the Atlas team, connect with them and others in the community on the headless Discord channel or check out the State of Atlas 2024.
Alternatively, if you’re curious to try headless development yourself, sign up for a free Sandbox account to get started.
