Creating a Timeline of WP vs WP Engine
Two weeks ago, I was on a 12-hour train journey and got this idea to create a simple timeline of events of the WordPress and WP Engine conflict out of boredom.
Initially, I just thought to organize all the events for myself so that it’s easier to follow. But later, I bought a domain WPvsWPE.report and did an announcement tweet that you see below.
Was getting bored on a 12-hour train journey, so created a simple site to document the WordPress vs WP Engine dispute.
— DeepakNess (@DeepakNesss) October 17, 2024
And here we are: https://t.co/I5Vz6bQY6W
For this, I used @astrodotbuild along with @airtable as the database.
Please let me know if I missed something. 👇 pic.twitter.com/EQP4XHHYMX
The idea was to create a simple timeline of events which looks good on all devices, so I started looking for a timeline template and found one from Cruip that uses Tailwind. I liked the template and chose Astro.build for the website because I learned about it recently and wanted to give it a try.
The final tech-stack I used is:
- Astro.build for the website
- Airtable for storing the events data, and
- Netlify for hosting the site
Also, it became extra easy to use Netlify’s edge functions for SSR of data from Airtable, as I found a really useful GitHub repo for that. It made my job 2-3X easier.
Now, whenever I come across any new development in the WordPress (or, rather Matt Mullenweg) vs WP Engine drama, I just add a new row in my Airtable base (see above screenshot), and it automatically starts showing on the website after some time (I have a 10-min caching set up).
Lastly, I loved working with Astro as it is straightforward and will definitely use this again for my future projects.