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Comment by vineet | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

(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.

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