WordCamp Europe 2018 Recap: AMP and PWA

Recently I attended WCEU 2018 in Belgrade with quite a few colleagues from XWP. We were there in large part to promote the adoption of progressive technologies in WordPress. We spent a lot of our time at the Google booth where we had an area to talk about contributing to WordPress across a wide range of roles. I spent most of the time in the booth stationed at the AMP area talking about the new capabilities we recently published in the plugin’s v1.0-alpha1 release, and since then we’ve followed up by releasing v1.0-beta1.

I’m really excited about how the AMP plugin is turning out. It now enables you to create AMP-compatible themes in the WordPress way; your theme can render your site in AMP using the same templates and stylesheets you would use normally on a non-AMP site. There is complete visual parity between your AMP pages and your non-AMP pages, aside for some differences in embeds (compare this post with AMP and without AMP). This being the case, you don’t even need to have a non-AMP version of your site anymore (the Paired mode), as the Native mode can just serve your entire site in AMP (such as xwp.co). AMP restricts what HTML you can use in order to guarantee performance and security, and the plugin never serves a response that contains invalid AMP in it. The plugin has a validation workflow to identify what the AMP validation errors are, where they are coming from in the page, and which theme/plugin is to blame. Please try it out and refer to the wiki for all the details on how to leverage the new features, especially Adding Theme Support and Implementing Interactivity.

My colleagues Alberto Medina (of Google) and Thierry Muller (of XWP) gave a great talk on Progressive WordPress which also dove into why AMP is important and how the AMP plugin brings its benefits to WordPress:

And we were interviewed on the topic of Progressive WordPress by Sarah Gooding at WP Tavern:

WCEU Panel Discusses Progressive WordPress Themes, AMP, and Gutenberg

On the topic of Progressive Web Apps, after Matt Mullenweg’s keynote someone asked during the Q&A about about a future where WordPress could be used to create to create apps. Matt responded:

There’s very exciting technologies coming out of two big corporations, one of which is a sponsor of WordCamp Europe, thank you Google. […] The other thing coming from Google which is very very exciting since they also contribute to the largest open source browser which is chrome—progressive web apps. So there’s lots of technologies around there that I think could drastically speed up how wp-admin works in a way that makes it a much more app-like experience without it actually needing to be completely rewritten from the ground up. So I feel like there is an opportunity to get… sort of almost like a JavaScript app-like performance increases from the wp-admin in a mostly backwards-compatible way, with progressive web app technology. So that’s very very exciting. It’s also open standards. They’re being supported by many places. So I feel like there’s a time there when it looked pretty dark to be honest for the web, particularly around performance. Things were just going slower and of course we know users start to tend toward things that are faster. So the apps were winning. But between AMP, progressive web apps, and just all the improvements and optimizations that we’re making including things coming under the hood like PHP7, basically doubling performance of WordPress overnight. […] These things are making it so that we can a really competitive experience and I’m excited about the future of the web.

As I just tweeted, there is now a PWA feature plugin on the WordPress.org directory. Its purpose is to curate Progressive Web App capabilities for proposed merging into WordPress core: service workers, the web app manifest, and improved HTTPS support.

PWA

This PWA feature plugin is intended to equip and facilitate other plugins which implement PWA features. It’s not intended to negate any existing plugins with these features, but rather to allow such plugins (and themes) to work together seamlessly and expand upon them. The plugin’s first release (v0.1.0) includes support for the web app manifest and an API for themes and plugins to register scripts for service workers, of which two are installed: one for the frontend (scope: ~/) and one for the admin (scope: ~/wp-admin/). A next step for service workers in the PWA feature plugin is to integrate Workbox to provide a declarative WordPress PHP abstraction for managing the caching strategies for routes, with support for detecting conflicts. You can follow development and contribute to the plugin on GitHub.

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Photos not taken by me are courtesy of Ryan Kienstra, Alberto Medina, and Paul Bakaus.