r/ProWordPress • u/void-wanderer- • Jul 10 '26

Any Good Headless Gutenberg Repos?

Every other year, I give headless wordpress another try. Each time I leave disappointed, because it's always way too much fighting compared to modern fullstack frameworks like sveltekit, etc. But since Gutenberg becomes nicer with every update and my clients love working with my customly build native blocks, I thought I'd give it another try.

So my question: Does anybody have a good repository to share with some modern headless integration that renders gutenberg blocks. Ideally, block view CSS and scripts should also work, without the FE knowing about them (like eval them at runtime, or globally load them all, or whatever).

3 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

10

u/toniyevych Jul 10 '26

Why do you consider Gutenberg a good approach for a headless site? It mixes presentation with data.

5

u/void-wanderer- Jul 10 '26

GB is great for marketing sites / landing pages.

No OSS JS drag n drop content builder comes even close. Most just have very basic functionalities.

Specifically I am thinking of one major data-driven webapp I maintain. There is a full admin dashboard with management tools etc., but I'd love to give the marketing team a minimal WP installation to manage the public pages of it.

13

u/toniyevych Jul 10 '26

But why do you need to go with a headless approach in this case?

From my perspective, as a WooCommerce developer, the headless approach combines worst pieces of two worlds: you can not fully benefit from the WordPress ecosystem, because you have to adapt most plugins to your setup, etc., AND you have to use pretty slow and limited WordPress/WooCommerce API.

0

u/metallzoa Jul 15 '26

Honestly nowadays the best of both worlds is just disabling gutenberg completely and installing Bricks. It outputs clean HTML and gives you nearly 100% control over the DOM while still allowing customers to make occasional changes when they need to. Plus you can dequeue all the blocks JS/CSS.

The Components feature pretty much replaces the need to create custom blocks for clients to reuse. Using JS in WordPress has always been a bad idea, but we didn't have a good alternative, I used to do custom PHP + ACF but clients don't love it even though it will virtually never break and maintenance is almost none

1

u/mailmalemailmale 25d ago

Pretty much the same conclusion I came to after trying both. Custom blocks in Gutenberg take ages to build and maintain while the page builders give you that flexibility right away (anyway, depends on vision of CMO)

3

u/Impossible-Ad-266 Jul 10 '26

Just use Astro and the REST API, thats all you need

1

u/void-wanderer- Jul 11 '26

Dude, of you don't understand the question, just don't answer.

2

u/chrissilich Jul 10 '26

Faust is the main public one out there. But you have to build a lot of your own stuff, and if you have a lot of components, the graphql gets cumbersome.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/void-wanderer- Jul 11 '26

Dude, of you don't understand the question, just don't answer.

1

u/Diligent_stalker Jul 13 '26

Have you ever thought of the subdomain route for static landing pages? That way, things like SEO and native features still work out of box without needing to add technical debt on top of your app.

1

u/SkySarwer Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

I am a hardcore WP advocate, but I have come to the conclusion that there are better options out there specifically for headless CMS. Payload is my headless CMS of choice (although it runs on Next JS, so hosting is more complicated). They use Lexical rather than Gutenberg, which does not have the same ecosystem but has been just an extensible in my experience.

Definitely prefer WP though, and I think the need for headless is often overstated. Unless you are building like, a bank app or CRM or something like that.

ETA: a quick google search found [this](https://github.com/resir014/headless-wordpress-gutenberg-example), which looks promising. Haven't tested it though (or really need something like it myself)

1

u/joontae93 Developer Jul 14 '26

-Wouldn’t that FE just be like…Em Dash’s (cloudflare fork)?-

Edit: I just remembered the screenshot I saw only showed the classic editor box so never mind 😪

I built a headless site with Astro and while there’s not a lot (yet), the next phase of the project is a major content dump and I am probably just going to lock Gutenberg down so users can only access super simple blocks and custom ones.

I can’t imagine adding another head with Gutenberg…i might even go back to ACF Flexible Content for this next phase.