How Tinder Used Gatsby to Build a WordPress Site in React (Goodbye, PHP)

Michelle Gienow
Michelle Gienow
April 7th, 2020

Welcome to the Gatsby Days 2020 Video Blog: Los Angeles Edition. In this series of eleven videos, you can catch up with all the wit and wisdom shared at the presentations from our February community gathering in LA. If you weren’t able to make it in person, these videos are the next best thing to owning a time machine! (Though owning a time machine would be super cool for sure, joining us at our next Gatsby Days would be pretty awesome, too 💜. Follow Gatsby on Twitter to keep up with when registration starts, speaker announcements and other developments).

Kyle Boss is a Tinder web developer who was presented with a daunting challenge on his very first day at the dating app company: build a new WordPress blog site that can help people navigate online/browser and app-based dating. The problem? Kyle is a React developer and wasn’t eager to use PHP for this new site 🙀. Fortunately, he learned that Tinder had already decided to use Gatsby as a bridge between WordPress and React.

In his presentation at Gatsby Days LA 2020, Kyle explains how Gatsby enables developers to set up and use React as a front end for WordPress—avoiding the use of PHP almost entirely. Discover how this approach empowered content creators to benefit from the ease of using WordPress while empowering developers to work with their preferred tools. And learn how Tinder’s use of Gatsby also helped the company avoid the dreaded “succulent apocalypse” of 2019.

Michelle Gienow
Written by
Michelle Gienow

Writes things @ GatsbyJS. Chaotic good frontend dev, caffeine addict, backyard chicken wrangler 🐓.

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