I’ve been working at Automattic only for 8 months now, but I must admit that so far this is the most exciting period of my 10 years long professional career. I’m lucky to work with amazing people on new WordPress.com admin interface called Calypso. This is an universal (aka isomorphic) JavaScript single page app written in ES6 using webpack, express, React, Flux, WordPress Rest API and many other front-end libraries.
Open-sourcing Calypso
Calypso codebase was open-sourced after one year and a half of cross-team collaboration through GitHub and peer code reviews through the PR review system. You can check out the active public repository Automattic/wp-calypso as we continue to develop it. Everyone is invited to contribute.
Official announcement on Automattic Engineering blog:
More thoughts from Automattic CEO – Matt Mullenweg:
Industry reactions
There was lots of positive feedback from the community about open-sourcing new WordPress.com and the technical solutions used to build it. I collected some of them and present below.
Facebook Open Source:
John-David Dalton – creator of lodash:
Christopher Chedeau – React core developer from Facebook:
Mikael Rogers – creator of NodeConf & JSFest (also retweeted by Node.js):
Dan Abramov – creator of Redux and React Hot Loader from Facebook:
Dr. Axel Rauschmayer – author of 2ality blog and books (Speaking JavaScript, Exploring ES6):
Answer with a simplified architectural diagram comes from Nikolay Bachiyski from Automattic.
Desktop Apps
What is even more exciting Calypso codebase was also used to build desktop applications for all the platforms. It was possible thanks to the Electron framework which allows to write cross-platform apps using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. WordPress.com desktop app was fully open-sourced a few weeks after Calypso. You can access the source and documentation on GitHub at the Automattic/wp-desktop repository.
App for Mac:
App for Windows:
App for Linux:
More reading about Calypso
If you are looking for more details about new WordPress.com, you should check also those links to interesting blog posts:
- Clearing the air: Is WordPress being rewritten in Node.js and React? – by Wes Bos
- Six Things You Should Know About WordPress Moving to JavaScript – by Alex Johnson
- Thoughts on WordPress – by Klaus Harris
- The new WordPress.com – by Ben Dwyer
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