Esports Publishing at Dexertos with Rob Humar

12/15/22 • 54 min

In this podcast episode, Fran and Jeff talk with Rob Humar, the head of web development at Dexertos, the world's largest esports publishing platform. As a media company, Dexertos does around 60 million monthly page views. Rob walks us through some of the details of the Dexertos tech stack, which includes Next.js and headless WordPress using WPGraphQL.
Rob discusses how the primary driver of their switch to headless was new feature velocity and futureproofing their frontend stack. By sticking with WordPress as the CMS for their 80K posts, they were able to gain some of the benefits of a full rewrite without migrating CMSs. As we dig into the details, we talk about how Dexertos uses Next.js ISR WPGraphQL Smart Cache to handle some of the demands of breaking real-time news.
As an international publisher, Dexertos also has sites in French and Spanish, and Rob describes how they manage all of this using WordPress multisite for the CMS and using one Next.js codebase across all three different sites.
Rob walks us through what the experience for the content editor looks like on the Dexertos site, which limits some of the choices in the block editor and uses ACF to structure data for custom post types.
As of December 2022, Dexertos won esports coverage platform of the year, which is a testament to the work Rob and his team are doing on their platform.

Previous Episode

Gatsby and the Modular Web with Sam Bhagwat

In this episode, Fran and Jeff talk with Sam Bhagwat, the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Gatsby Cloud, about the modular web and Sam’s new book. The group spends some time talking about Gatsby’s origins and how it serves the use cases of the content web.

During the conversation, Sam provides a good overview of the architectural patterns that underpin the modular web and we talk about some of the different ways people talk about these moving pieces: JAMstack, decoupled, headless, etc.

Sam has spent a lot of time working with organizations making the move towards modular, and he lays out a bunch of different classes of benefits as well as profiles of organizations making the switch.

The conversation shifts towards the struggle of businesses integrating 3rd party systems, and Sam gives us a sneak peek into Gatsby’s Valhalla solution. The service was launched publicly since the time of this recording.

When considering WordPress as a headless CMS, Sam shares his thoughts on how supporting the functionality of popular plugins is one of the opportunities we have in the ecosystem.

Sam’s Posts on Gatsby

Sam’s Twitter

Sam’s Book “Modular: The Web's New Architecture: (And How It's Changing Online Business)”

Next Episode

WPGraphQL Smart Cache with Jason Bahl

In this episode, Fran and Jeff catch up with Jason Bahl, the creator of WPGraphQL to discuss a new caching extension for WPGraphQL. Jason is a figure in the headless WordPress ecosystem that likely needs no introduction, but the group discusses some of their early experiences with headless WordPress.
WPGraphQL Smart Cache makes a user's GraphQL queries more efficient by providing network and object caching layer options for users using the plugin. Jason explains a ton of interesting technical details about the caching implementations. He digs into the following things:

Using GET/POST requests with network requests
How cache invalidation works in this plugin in a nuanced way
How Smart Cache can work with framework rendering patterns
What other hosting companies can do to enable WPGraphQL Smart Cache on their platform
How object caching works in the plugin if you can't integrate with a network hosting layer
How a new feature called persisted queries allows you to store your queries on the server, like a SQL stored procedure
Considerations for people using plugins or extensions to store custom data

Check out the plugin in WordPress plugin repository and leave the WPGraphQL team some feedback or a review: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpgraphql-smart-cache/

Jason's Twitter
https://twitter.com/jasonbahl
Jason's GitHub
https://github.com/jasonbahl
WPGraphQL
https://github.com/wp-graphql/wp-graphql
WPGraphQL Smart Cache
https://github.com/wp-graphql/wp-graphql-smart-cache
WPGraphQL Smart Cache with Next.js and Apollo by Fran Agulto
https://developers.wpengine.com/blog/wpgraphql-smart-cache-with-next-js-and-apollo