Lars Gersmann introduced us to his project “JSON Schema Field/Form Renderer” for the CloudFest Hackathon.
Transcript (auto generated)
Simon:
Okay, Lars, what is your project called and what is it all about?
Lars:
It’s called the JSON Schema and Forms Project, and it’s all about the WordPress frontend and JSON Schema.
Right now, frontends in, for example, the settings pages and so on are handwritten using PHP formulas.
So it’s complicated to adapt, for example, another style or even Gutenberg controls and so on. And the second thing is, because it’s hard-coded, you can change the WordPress admin dashboard.
But if you used an abstraction level like JSON Schema to define which settings are required by a form, and the settings can be rendered to the form, then you have two benefits.
You have automatically generated beautiful-looking settings pages and stuff.
And you can even change the look and feel maybe in five years or ten years if the design changes.
And even integration of plugin setting pages or even the WordPress setting pages can be adapted in different systems.
For example, in account pages from hosters and so on.
But you can use it also in Gutenberg.
Simon:
So what is that sounds like? That’s not all. But it’s some of the key points.
It sounds like this is a project that will go on for some time even after the hackathon. what is it you plan on shipping by the end of CloudFest Hackathon?
Lars:
Actually the dream is to actually get it into WordPress Core, in some not actually the code from the Hackathon this is just a proof but it’s amazing what we did in the last two days.
So we get a form renderer, we got inside the WordPress and preview so you type on the JSON schema, which is just a few JSON snippets, and you get immediately rendered the form, including validation and all the stuff.
We did some Gutenberg blocks and so on. So the proof says it all works.
And the next steps would be to get in touch with the right people to create clean code, which can then be contributed to WordPress or to Gutenberg code.
Simon:
So your hackathon project is basically a proof of concept.
Lars:
Right.
Simon:
Okay.
Lars:
And it’s far more on completion than just a product.
Simon:
Thank you for taking the time.
Lars:
Thank you too.