I came onboard last year, and at that time we had a vanilla Wordpress stack that had been worked on by various contractors over the years. The layered codebase was hard to maintain and extend, so we did some surgery to replace the FE with Next.js, React, and GraphQL. On the BE we kept Wordpress, but put it behind a GraphQL API that stitches in both WP content and other data from other services.

I have no love for Wordpress, but we have a lot of legacy data and the admin GUI is what our company is used to. So we kept it. However, our use of a stitched GraphQL api enables us to move functionality out of WP into other services. Small example: articles often include the social media handles of the athlete. This data is stored, managed, and served from another system. The stitched GraphQL schema has been a real benefit to us. One API to rule them all.

Otherwise we’re on Google Cloud, use Fastly for caching Next.js SSR content, and manage deployments with Kubernetes (managed GKE, nothing fancy).

It might come across as over-engineered, but our system is simple, solid, performant, extensible, and insert-more-buzz-words.

If it sounds interesting, we are expanding the team and would love to hear from people!