For the future of Sage, my vote is to continue favour building reactivity in spots, with an overall back-end-driven site.
Going with an all-reactive, single-page-app style, backend-hydrated, GraphQL-powered website sure sells for those who want to build a skill moat as a developer.
But that’s not Sage. That’s something else. Gridsome caught my attention in that category (go Vue!)
Sage can still take some nice aspects of all-reactive sites:
- Like using Turbolinks for quick page transitions (if you’re going to build the whole stack to not work with Wordpress plugins, why not keep it simple and pick Turbolinks?). While you’re at it, why not use stimulusjs with it too.
- Like serving the main css deferred and serve a minimal css inlined in the head of key pages. It could even be a per-template minimal inline style e.g. for single, for home, for archive, etc. That could be the Sage way too.
- Like picking a default for lazy loading of content blocks, especially on story pages built with ACF flex modules or something similar.
- Like providing optimized webpack configs and helpers for adding non-all-encompassing reactivity in spots with Vue or React for animated svgs, staff directories, filtering long lists, dynamic search results or live-updating infographics. One way to do this would be to bundle wp-graphql into bedrock by default.
That seems exciting to me, it seems more sane to me, and it seems more Sage to me anyway.