Calypso – new WordPress.com

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:

The Story Behind the New https://t.co/YpSAP6vRKI, from the people who built it https://t.co/G84kFe0oM5 pic.twitter.com/fYoH0aiTsm

— AutomatticEng (@AutomatticEng) November 23, 2015

More thoughts from Automattic CEO – Matt Mullenweg:

Dance to Calypso https://t.co/v8O8Ht9Q0a pic.twitter.com/hTECjGclcp

— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) November 23, 2015

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:

Congratulations to @WordPressdotcom for the new site rebuilt with @reactjs https://t.co/gBk5aVjJ1H https://t.co/4yU0iszngZ

— Meta Open Source (@MetaOpenSource) November 23, 2015

John-David Dalton – creator of lodash:

https://twitter.com/jdalton/status/668980969580314625

Christopher Chedeau – React core developer from Facebook:

WordPress Admin UI, that powers 25% of the websites in the world, has been rebuilt with React. *Mind bown* https://t.co/uvAJCuTfoQ

— vjeux ✪ (@Vjeux) November 23, 2015

Mikael Rogers – creator of NodeConf & JSFest (also retweeted by Node.js):

WordPress' new Calypso is also another GitHub success story https://t.co/pcLGgIKQph pic.twitter.com/ZnVNGabv6l

— Mikeal Rogers (@mikeal) November 24, 2015

Dan Abramov – creator of Redux and React Hot Loader from Facebook:

https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/669234743528062977

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer – author of 2ality blog and books (Speaking JavaScript, Exploring ES6):

@rauschma here’s a simplified version, tl; dr – the server could’ve been PHP, but we were planning for SSR pic.twitter.com/0eoFctwaRQ

— Nikolay Bachiyski (@nikolayb) November 24, 2015

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:

Welcome to the New https://t.co/eRvNKWaolr and https://t.co/eRvNKWaolr App for Mac! https://t.co/M1pDMNSWLh pic.twitter.com/D5LfVZuTri

— WordPress.com (@wordpressdotcom) November 23, 2015

App for Windows:

The New https://t.co/eRvNKWaolr App for Windows Is Here https://t.co/GUdkyT1kTl pic.twitter.com/WtVBy5l7bj

— WordPress.com (@wordpressdotcom) December 9, 2015

App for Linux:

https://t.co/YpSAP6vRKI Desktop App Goes Open Source, Linux App Arrives https://t.co/NzGBSDrrJU pic.twitter.com/bMkJMgJi1W

— AutomatticEng (@AutomatticEng) December 17, 2015

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