In today’s fast-paced world, numerous websites are vying to get on top and stay ahead in the competition. Which means you need to come up with something that is aesthetically pleasing and exceptional enough to sustain for the long run. After making a grand entrance onto the web’s stage, WordPress as a CMS platform has succeeded in overcoming the misconception that traditionally belies it.
With the recent update in its visual editor, i.e. the introduction of Gutenberg WordPress editor featured in WordPress 5.0, there’s a lot of hype and healthy debate going on around Gutenberg involving those people who develop and use WordPress. The sole purpose of the editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable- as per described on WordPress.org. In fact, I personally feel that Gutenberg enables WordPress not just to write articles but also build content layouts. Without a shadow of a doubt, one can say we are moving towards a simplified user experience.
For example- in a post, there is a paragraph, header followed by two paragraphs. It simply means there are four blocks. Available with a set of default “core” blocks- paragraph, header, recent posts, image, blockquote, Gutenberg tries to make the most of these blocks while creating content.
The Javascript-driven interface is built using Facebook’s open-source user interface library “React.” And that’s the reason why one must use React for WordPress Gutenberg development. The following post explains a bit about creating your own custom blocks for use in the Gutenberg editor using React Js. But before that, let us go through the Pros and Cons of using WordPress with React JS.
Over the past few years, React JS has taken the WordPress community by great surprise. According to several experts, it is extremely fast, written purely in JavaScript, leverages libraries like Node and React, 100% API-powered and fully responsive. As a result, hundreds not thousands of PHP developers have jumped in the bandwagon in order to take advantage of the newly proposed tech-stack and build apps on top of WordPress of course, in the React way. In addition to the WordPress ecosystem, Gutenberg is expected to move forward the whole web. Down below I would like to mention a few PROs/CONs that must be taken into consideration.
Pros
Easy to start with- Writing React templates is extremely easy. In fact, you will find them pretty similar to Mustache templates, except the markup is directly in your JavaScript component code. Being extremely unusual, React encourages one to pull all your markup, style and functionality in the same place. Which also provides you convenience and extreme modularity in the long run.
Speed- Here you don’t need to think about re-rendering! Which means if something has been rendered before or whether it is for the first time, you don’t need to worry at all! Which also means that the first render and the 100th render of the same component can be handled in exactly the same way.
Native word accessibility- React allows developers to build mobile apps with the help of JavaScript only. It even enables you to compose a rich mobile UI from declarative components.
Cons
Developing community conventions- How to structure this or how can I handle this, is frequently asked by amateur React app developers. Basically, here we do not have strong options on how their libraries should be used because they certainly do. The problem is with the rapid changes, one does not have any time to solidify into common practices. Only If you are among those who monthly, weekly, daily pay attention to changes in the React community could tell you the best way to use X library.
How Is React Being Used in Gutenberg?
The React library is popularly known for creating reusable components and that’s the reason why one can compose interfaces in the best possible manner. Blocks are the basic unit of the new WordPress visual editor and developers tend to create content out of one or more blocks. Just make sure that in the Gutenberg code you use wp.createElement instead of React.createElement. Although, it works the same but as soon as you will change React’s API, the CMS has the power to decide when to support those changes and provide a backward-compatibility wrapper or decided not to.
According to several React app development companies, it is quite a fun library to play with and the moment you learn React, you can more easily understand the more advanced Gutenberg concepts — state management, unit tests, etc.
Rooney Reeves
Rooney Reeves is a content strategist and a technical blogger associated with well known firm for eTatvaSoft – Web, e-Commerce & React Native App Development Company in India. An old hand writer by day and an avid reader by night, she has a vast experience in writing about new products, software design and test-driven methodology. Her write-ups mainly features anything and everything related to the web!
With the true passion for creating compelling content for online and offline media, Rooney has donned multiple hats over the past several years.
Website:https://www.etatvasoft.com/
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