🎥 Live demo: wpmovies.dev

This is a demo plugin which shows the features of the Interactivity API for WordPress proposed in this post in Make WordPress Core blog.

The plugin is split into:

• /src/blocks/interactive - Start here to understand how to build interactive blocks with the Interactivity API. The folder contains all the custom interactive blocks used in the demo.

• /lib - The code that contains the runtime and internals of the Interactivity API and the configuration needed to run the demo.

• /wp-movies-theme - The custom theme used in the demo. Contains some custom styling and the templates for the header & footer as well as the movie & actors pages.

The Interactivity API is an experimental feature and not ready for adoption yet. It is under active development and its final public API is very likely going to change before an official release.

⚠️ WARNING: These instructions don't work anymore because there's a conflict between the Interactivity API shipped in the Block Interactivity Experiments plugin and the Interactivity API shipped now in Gutenberg. We'll migrate this repo to use only Gutenberg, but in the meantime, please use this Getting Started guide if you want to test the Interactivity API. If you have questions, you can open a discussion in the Interactivity API category of GitHub.

1. Install the required plugins:

   • If you use wp-env, run npx wp-env start to install the plugins automatically and run a local WP instance.

   • Otherwise, install the following plugins:

     • Gutenberg

     • Block Interactivity Experiments. This one requires Gutenberg to work.

     • Movies Demo Plugin. This one requires the Block Interactivity Experiments to work.

2. Install the dependencies and build the plugin:

   npm install && composer install
   npm run build

   If you plan on tinkering with the frontend code, start the webpack server which automatically rebuild the files when you make any changes:

   npm start
   

3. Install the theme:

   You need to install and activate the Movies Demo Theme. Again, if you are using wp-env, it is already installed by default and you just have to activate it. You can run:

     npx wp-env run cli "wp theme activate wp-movies-theme"

4. Add the movie and actor data to the WordPress database:

   You can import the data manually:

   1. Go to Tools > Import > WordPress and click on Run Importer.
   2. Select the wp_sampledata_movies.xml file.
   3. Select the Download and import file attachments and click on the Upload file and import.
   4. Repeat the process for the wp_sampledata_actors.xml file.
   5. Repeat the process for the wp_sampledata_media.xml file. This one can take up to five minutes.

   If you are using wp-env, you can run the following commands:

     npx wp-env run cli "import wp-content/plugins/wp-movies-demo/wp_sampledata_movies.xml --authors=create"
     npx wp-env run cli "import wp-content/plugins/wp-movies-demo/wp_sampledata_media.xml  --authors=create"
     npx wp-env run cli "import wp-content/plugins/wp-movies-demo/wp_sampledata_actors.xml --authors=create"

   If you run into any problems you can run npx wp-env clean all and start this step over again.

5. Set the permalinks to use the Post name in Settings > Permalinks.

   If you are using wp-env you can just run this command:

   npx wp-env run cli "wp rewrite structure '/%postname%/'"

6. Change settings to show 8 posts and RSS items per page in Settings > Reading

7. Enable the Client Side Navigations in the Settings > WP Directives.

When enabled, the lists of movies and actors will paginate without doing a full page refresh. You can enable this behavior in your WordPress admin page in Settings > WP Directives. Click around to the next/previous page of the movies or actors. You the list is loaded without a delay. This is because the HTML for that page is prefetched ahead of time, and only the nodes that are different between the current page and the next page are updated.

When you add a movie to favourites notice how the number of movie likes is preserved when navigating to another page. In addition to client-side navigations, the Interactivity API uses a smart DOM diffing algorithm. This allows the interactive state of blocks on the current page to be preserved!

Try searching for movies or actors. The search results are rendered dynamically on the server!

Try opening the site editor and removing the "Search" template. You'll notice that the Search experience keeps working but that now the Search results look different. That's because in the absence of the Search template, the Archive template is being used. The Interactivity API is designed to work with the server-rendered markup and Full-site editing.

When you navigate to the page for a movie, you can play its trailer. If you have the client-side navigations enabled, you'll notice that the trailer will keep playing as you keep navigating around the site!

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