[cies]

> but WP can get you cheap devs fast

Beware that you get what you pay for. If you need a high-traffic capable product with lots of modern web stack in (like React and some WebSocket thingies) and you plan to choose a fresh stack then going with WP might just be total productivity killer on the project.

WP is not a place to build your custom stuff on top of. I worked on several projects where we used WP headless, as an admin interface (since web master teams love it), but relinquish all the template rendering to an app framework (Rails in our case). We open sourced the infrastructure of it[1].

Not that Rails is so fast, but we knew it well and caching/ integrations with APIs/ ElasticSearch are all quite straight forward in Rails.

1: https://github.com/wponrails/wp-connector

[zapt02]

This smells of NIH to me. You built a presentation layer for WP in Ruby because that's what you are comfortable with. There's nothing wrong with that, but don't pretend that you are building anything other than (possibly) useless middleware. If you wanted a fresh stack with WP, you would use the WP API, Vue or React coupled with any caching software (Nginx, Varnish).

[cies]

> fresh stack with WP, you would use the WP API, Vue or React coupled with any caching software (Nginx, Varnish)

Has been considered.

But there where many integrations that were required, and they are simply too simple in Ruby land. Also we needed to take traffic --yet serve dynamic pages-- and support user logins. The solution I mention does use WP-API, but on top of that it also allows "previews" and the "admin bar" (would be quite interesting to implement those with React).

edit: That we had a lot of Rails expertise in house did help, as mentioned. We also do plenty React, but a lot of the integrations needed to be server-side and many were batch-processes.