Hi everyone! I set a ridiculous goal of trying to have WP GraphQL be production ready before the new year. I knew it was not attainable but sometimes when you set something ridiculous you can really motivate yourself to complete it. A lot of progress was made on WP GraphQL, but it is still very far off from production readiness. I think by late June 2017, WP GraphQL will actually be ready, given the same level of work being steadily put into it. The holidays were great and were a necessary refresher for heading into the new year. What’s left to finish off WP GraphQL 1.0.0?
Roadmap, where WP GraphQL is at.
Version 0.1.0 will mark the completion of the initial type system. What is the type system? The type system in GraphQL defines what can be done in GraphQL. In WP GraphQL there needs to be a type system to support posts, comments, pages, menus, plugins, themes, sites, networks etc… Not only does the type system need to support each basic WordPress type, but fields within each type may have a type themselves. For instance any field that is a url is not just a string but a special url type. Laying the foundation of the type system is the bulk of the work that needs to be done. Currently WP GraphQL almost supports every default type of content laid out in WordPress.
WP GraphQL version 0.2.0 will focus on improving the architecture of serving GraphQL requests. Currently the code to serve a GraphQL request is very ad hoc and sloppy. Improving the design of serving a GraphQL request will enable the ability to start improving the extensibility of WP GraphQL. Version 0.2.0 will also focus on making WP GraphQL Relay compliant. WP GraphQL version 0.3.0 will focus on locking down the API and making it secure, support authentication, and respect the privilege system of WordPress.
What’s Next?
After this is done WP GraphQL will be production ready. At this point it should be determined whether mutation queries (create, update, delete) should be shipped before or after the 1.0.0 release. The current goal is to provide a read only GraphQL API as that is where GraphQL really shines. I think the way REST is structured, makes it alot better suited towards updating, deleting, and creating resources. WP GraphQL, in the future, might just wrap its mutation queries around the WP REST API.
I look forward to seeing how WP GraphQL shapes up over this year, and hopefully more people will want to get involved as well! If you would like to learn more about WP GraphQL head over to the GitHub repository and introduce yourself.