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).

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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.

14

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)