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Comment by vineet | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't Wordpress.com essentially a multi-user edition of Wordpress the open source project? I am curious if Calypso means fewer releases of the Wordpress project?

I noticed that some of the docs require a login, for ex: https://wpcalypso.wordpress.com/devdocs/design Anyone know if this is a bug, or part of the new approach?

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WordPress.com still is a single WordPress install and all of the millions of websites are still generated and powered by PHP and MySQL.

The difference is that rather than using the admin interface that ships with WordPress, we're encouraging usage of this new interface. It still talks to WordPress via a PHP-powered REST API.

In short, it's a new _interface_ for WordPress, not a replacement for WordPress itself.

> https://wpcalypso.wordpress.com/devdocs/design Anyone know if this is a bug, or part of the new approach?

Bug. That's one of our internal staging sites and the devdocs are stripped when pushed out to the production URL.

I've opened an issue for you: https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issues/577

EDIT: Not private! Just requires a login from any WordPress.com account. There's discussion going on on that ticket to move it somewhere that doesn't require a login but it might not be possible.

If it is a new interface for WordPress, then why does it need Node?

Thanks for filing the issue. I will reply there.

As it's REST API powered, it doesn't. It could have been anything we wanted it to be. We just went with React & co. because we determined it'd be the best solution.

(seems we've hit max depth)

> So what does the Node powered REST API provide that PHP powered traditional Wordpress API does not?

Our REST API is PHP-powered and built on top of WordPress: https://developer.wordpress.com/docs/api/

Calypso is a React-based administration client for that API.

What's confusing is that, if the React-based admin client uses an API to talk to the PHP wordpress site, why involve node.js at all?

As far as I can tell, the node.js portion is just returning an empty admin.html, and that's where client-side React.js kicks in? It seems PHP would be able to do that pretty well, with the advantage of single technology and a more obvious approach for the self-hosted wp.org sites.

My understanding is that the client and server side code is all of the same thing and Node.js is just used to generate the initial page load with the client continuing on from there. I wasn't involved with it's development so I could very well be incorrect.

https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/blob/master/docs/gu...

So there are lots of folders and files in their server dir https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/tree/master/server - but from what I can tell they're not doing universal javascript with react running on both client and server.

So what does the Node powered REST API provide that PHP powered traditional Wordpress API does not?

> Wasn't Wordpress.com essentially a multi-user edition of Wordpress the open source project? I am curious if Calypso means fewer releases of the Wordpress project?

I wouldn't expect so. Calypso relies upon WordPress to power the API. Automattic still has a dedicated team devoted to the WordPress project, working alongside the rest of the WordPress community.

> I noticed that some of the docs require a login, for ex: https://wpcalypso.wordpress.com/devdocs/design Anyone know if this is a bug, or part of the new approach?

Good question. Issue filed here: https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issues/577. I'm not positive, but I think it might be because several of our components require a logged-in user in order to render correctly.

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