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Local Launches Atlas Add-on for Sandboxing Headless WordPress Sites

Local, a popular WordPress development tool maintained by WP Engine, has launched a new add-on for quickly spinning up headless WordPress sites on its new Atlas platform.

The company has been working to capture the headless WordPress hosting market over the past few years, investing in a new team dedicated to building out its headless offerings aimed at developers. It is one of the first managed hosts to offer a packaged product that handles all the dependencies and configuration required to launch a headless site.

The new add-on is called Atlas: Headless WP. It makes it easy for users to create a site with a Node.js frontend that uses WP Engine’s Faust.js headless framework for WordPress. It can be found inside the latest version of Local under the Add-ons menu.

The Atlas add-on watches any changes made to frontend code and compiles them after a file is saved. The add-on’s help docs have a guide to the folder structure for the headless sites it creates:

  • app – Contains the files of a typical WordPress site. Any changes made here will be reflected in the WordPress backend.
  • app-node – The Javascript frontend which the Node.js process is watching and compiling.

The Atlas add-on gives users access to three blueprints that include starter code, plugins, content models, and page structure to jumpstart site development. One creates a barebones site with just the scaffolding necessary to get started. The second blueprint is for a portfolio site and includes a blog and pages to list projects. The third blueprint appears to be very similar but just includes a blog and menu with no portfolio.

It is important to note that Atlas can only be enabled on new sites in Local, as the app has no way to convert existing sites into a headless site.

Sites built using the add-on are supported in the import/export site workflows, but the company’s support team confirmed that Atlas sites can only be hosted at WP Engine. This is one of the chief drawbacks of the framework.

For this reason, the Atlas add-on essentially functions sort of like a sales funnel for WP Engine, since sites produced using it are not portable to be hosted anywhere else. It does offer an easy way to experiment with headless WordPress to see how it all works together. It’s also convenient for WP Engine customers who want to use it to create new headless sites with less work setting up and configuring them.

The Atlas add-on for Local is still in beta, so it has a few rough edges. Users can get help for their support questions by creating a topic in the Atlas: Headless WP category of the community forums.

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WP Engine Makes Local Pro Free for All Users

WP Engine announced today that Local Pro, the commercial upgrade for its local WordPress development product, is now free for all users. Beginning with version 6.0, all features that formerly required a paid subscription are now available with a free Local account. These include Live Links Pro, Instant Reload, Link Checker, and MagicSync.

“We believe Local Pro features benefit a broader WordPress developer community and we want to deliver the full value of Local to more developers than ever,” WP Engine Senior Vice President Seth Halpern said. “We want to empower the freedom to create on WordPress by making all Local features available for free.”

WP Engine’s recently published research estimates the WordPress economy at $596.7B. The company may be in a better position to gain customers for its hosting products if they make Local completely free, as the tool was designed to seamlessly connect with WP Engine and Flywheel’s hosting. It is currently used by more than 300,000 developers. Over the years Local has gained popularity due to how easy it makes setting up WordPress development and testing environments.

Version 6.0 also introduces Local’s new Cloud Backups add-on, which will allow users to backup to Google Drive or Dropbox. Cloud backups can be restored from the Tools tab. The 6.0 release post details a few features that have been moved to new locations in the interface:

  • MagicSync is now a global preference, and the default push/pull experience can be toggled in the Preferences menu. 
  • Live Links Pro, now Live Links, will be accessible for all users by connecting your Local account.
  • Link Checker and Instant Reload have been moved to the Local Add-ons Library. 
  • Xdebug Add-ons have moved from the Utilities tab into the Tools tab within Local.

Existing Local Pro subscribers will have access to priority support until September 1, 2021. After that time, dedicated ticket support will be discontinued in favor of directing users to the community forums and help docs. WP Engine is offering customers full or prorated refunds, which will be sent out before July 31, 2021.

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New Local Blueprint Enables One-Click Setup for Testing Full Site Editing

If you haven’t yet tested the Gutenberg team’s progress on the full site editing (FSE) project, WordPress developer Carrie Dils has created a blueprint for Local that makes it easy to jump right in. Full site editing is phase 2 on the Gutenberg roadmap and is one of the main focuses for WordPress core development in 2021. (Check out What Is Full Site Editing and What Does It Mean for the Future of WordPress for a more in-depth look at why it is critical for end users to provide feedback during its development.)

Local is one of the most popular free development tools for WordPress that allows users to set up new testing sites with one click, along with a host of more advanced features. Blueprints make it possible for users to save any site as a Blueprint so that it can be used as a quick start setup option later. The blueprint includes all files, databases, config files, and Local settings. Dils’ full site editing blueprint includes the following:

  • Gutenberg plugin (with “Full Site Editing” experiment enabled)
  • WordPress theme experiments (these are themes with support for full site editing) with the Twenty Twenty-One Blocks theme enabled
  • Gutenberg test data (demo blog posts that use the most common Gutenberg blocks)

Follow Dils’ instructions for downloading and installing the FSE blueprint on MacOS or Windows. Local does not yet have an easy way for installing and sharing blueprints to other Local users, so you will need to add it to the right place within the application’s files. If you find that you don’t have a Blueprints folder, it may be because it is hidden or because you have never created a blueprint before. Once the zip file is in the right location, you will see the full site editing blueprint among the advanced options when you set up a new site:

Once your site is set up, you can start exploring the brave new world of full site editing. (Be prepared – it is far from production ready but FSE is at a critical time in its development where it needs testing from real users to be a success.) The Gutenberg plugin may need to be updated to the latest. Your new site editing playground can be launched from the Site Editor menu item.

On the frontend you will find the Twenty Twenty Blocks theme activated. You can also test using the Twenty Twenty-One (TT1) Blocks theme, which was added to the WordPress.org Themes directory today, or any of the other experimental block based themes included in the blueprint. Click around, explore the template browser, try editing the template parts, change the global styles, and see how it’s coming along.

The current state of full site editing is rough. It’s hard to tell a feature from a bug at times, but once you get familiar with navigating it you might consider joining the FSE Outreach Experiment. This is an effort to test different aspects of site editing in order to ground the interface in real world feedback as it is developed. For the past few weeks, contributors have been testing the interaction between editing a post versus editing templates.

Anne McCarthy posted the first call for testing to the Make Test blog with instructions for participants.

This call for testing is designed to explore the interaction between the two editing experiences (post vs. template editing) to make sure it’s clear when you’re editing each, granular saving works properly, etc. Ultimately, being able to edit templates like index, single, or archive directly is a huge leap forward compared to what’s been possible in the past! Unlocking this level of customization gives you far more control to build the site you want and this call for testing is to help ensure it’s as intuitive as possible.

The second testing challenge should be published soon. Anyone can contribute by following along with the test script and leaving comments on the post or logging them as issues on GitHub. Participants are also invited to join the #fse-outreach-experiment channel on WordPress Slack for updates or questions regarding testing.

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Local 5.9.2 Adds Image Optimization via New Free Add-On

Local 5.9.2 was released this month with a new image optimization feature. The Pro version of Flywheel’s local WordPress development product got a revamp four months ago, bringing in a new collection of pre‑launch tools. While image optimization falls into that category, the company decided to make this new feature available to both free and pro tiers via an optional add-on.

Users can install the new add-on directly in the app and then navigate to Tools › Image Optimizer. After enabling the add-on and relaunching the app, Local will be able to scan the installation for image files and compress them offline, without using cloud-based services. The add-on allows users to navigate away from an active optimization session and carry on with development while it works in the background.

Before proceeding, users can also navigate to the Image Optimizer settings and elect to strip the metadata (i.e. focal length, date, time, and location) to further reduce the file size and, as a byproduct, remove potentially identifying data. The default optimization simply reduces file size and does not strip metadata.

After optimization is complete, an overview of the total reductions and disk space saved will be displayed.

The add-on currently uses jpeg-recompress to optimize images, a utility from the open source JPEG Archive project. Here is how it works:

Compress JPEGs by re-encoding to the smallest JPEG quality while keeping perceived visual quality the same and by making sure huffman tables are optimized. This is a lossy operation, but the images are visually identical and it usually saves 30-70% of the size for JPEGs coming from a digital camera, particularly DSLRs. 

Local’s development team plans to expand this in the future to add more options like lossless compression. Version 5.9.2 also fixes several bugs with the UI and adds improvements to make it more consistent.

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Flywheel Relaunches Local Pro with Revamped Live Links and New Host-Agnostic Pre-Launch Tools

Flywheel has relaunched Local Pro, the commercial upgrade for its free local WordPress development product. The first version of Local Pro, launched in July 2019, was heavily geared towards Flywheel customers, but the tool has gradually evolved to be more host-agnostic. This major update focuses on pre-launch features that allow developers to check links, optimize images, share a live link, and make changes with live reload.

“We saw an opportunity to build new tools into Local that pivot away from focusing on Flywheel customers and towards solving common WordPress developer pain-points,” Local product manager Jack Sellwood said.

“Our focus from here will be helping developers with pre-launch tasks like gathering feedback, testing, and optimizing their site before they go-live.”

More than 300,000 developers have tried Local since it first launched in 2017 and active users are up 90% year over year.

“We attribute that increase  to Local ‘Lightning’ which is the more reliable, performant version of Local that we launched last year,” Sellwood said.

This update also expands Local’s MagicSync capabilities to include both Flywheel and WP Engine. MagicSync allows developers to push or pull the files and/or database from staging and production environments. It gives an overview of which files are different and includes controls for ignoring certain files.

“We’d love to bring this to other hosts and we continue to explore how to do that, but the biggest challenge in doing this is maintaining the same, quality experience Local users have come to expect from Local Connect,” Sellwood said.

Live Links Revamped, More Cloud-based Services Coming in 2021

Local Pro also introduces a completely revamped solution for sharing local sites, built specifically for WordPress. For the past 12 months, the team has been building an alternative to ngrok to power its Live Links feature.

“We explored a few ways to improve the existing Live Links experience and found that this was a core technology, and we needed to own the whole stack of technologies involved,” Sellwood said. “A similar notion pushed us to build Lightning, which gave us better insight and ability to tackle bugs. VirtualBox was a black hole.”

Flywheel launched hub.localwp.com for users to manage their Local subscription for services like Live Links Pro that require a cloud component to function. The team plans to launch more later this year and in 2021. The Local Hub is a Laravel project that connects to custom infrastructure on Google Cloud.

“Local’s tunnel, like Local itself, is written in Node.js,” Sellwood said. “As a result, Live Links Pro handles 2x the number of HTTP requests in 50% less time. Live Links Pro is also secure by default with SSL and Privacy Mode (aka basic auth).”

The image optimizer and live reload features are coming soon to the Pro subscription. Building these pre-launch tools into Local allows users to leverage the power of their local machines, instead of relying on plugins. The image optimizer will be able to work offline and can tap into the user’s available computer resources.

Over the past three years, Local’s popularity has largely eclipsed that of other local WordPress development apps and packages like DesktopServer and InstantWP. Sellwood said the app’s most formidable competitors are advanced developer tools like Laravel Valet or custom Docker/VirtualBox setups.

“If you’ve invested a lot of time in a custom stack or setup, it’s hard to abandon that sunk cost,” Sellwood said. “Local abandoned virtualization completely in Lightning, and we knew, before we even launched, that some users would miss virtualization, so we’re exploring Site Environments powered by Docker as an option for advanced users.”

In addition to supporting more advanced development tools, the Local team aims to make advanced parts of WordPress development simpler and more approachable.

“Local has always been about providing an elegant UI that helps people dive deeper and level up as developers,” Sellwood said. “For example, WordPress developers might manage their database or interact with WP-CLI for the first time in Local because these advanced capabilities are available without any configuration. We’ll continue to make advanced parts of WordPress development simpler.

“Obviously, there’s a lot happening in WordPress right now with FSE (Full Site Editing) and headless, so we’re working with the other teams at WP Engine and elsewhere to help Local support this new future.”