Building WordPress theme on Windows

[cr101]

I am new to CRA and a React beginner.
I am planning to build a WordPress theme using React + Redux and the WP API. I will be using the Foxhound theme as a guide.
I currently have a WordPress website running on my local Windows 10 machine using Wampserver 3.0.8 (Apache 2.4.23, PHP 7.0.11, MySQL 5.7.15).
I am using an Apache virtual host and the WordPress website loads at mywebsite.dev

Does CRA support named URLs e.g. mywebsite.dev as opposed to localhost:3000?

[gaearon]

I think you should be able to use HOST and PORT environment variables for this.
See Advanced Configuration.

Does this help?

[cr101]

@gaearon Yes that helps. Thanks.

The other question I have is: does anyone have any examples/tutorials of how to build only parts of a WordPress theme as a Single Page App instead of the entire website to get the full SEO benefits as discussed in this blog post?
SEO is a challenge for all websites built as a SPA.

[viankakrisna]

@olivia101 for SEO i think you could do a user agent switching. It's similar to what prerender.io does. But instead of an external service you could feed the bots to wordpress' own theme engine. I'm building one myself currently.

[gaearon]

I’m going to close as this is not directly actionable in this repo, but feel free to continue the discussion!

[viankakrisna]

for anyone who needs user agent switching for bots in WordPress / PHP:

if (
    strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "baiduspider"] !== false ||
    strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "twitterbot"] !== false ||
    strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "facebookexternalhit"] !== false ||
    strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "rogerbot"] !== false ||
    strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "linkedinbot"] !== false ||
    strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "embedly"] !== false ||
    strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "quora link preview"] !== false ||
    strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "showyoubot"] !== false ||
    strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "outbrain"] !== false ||
    strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "pinterest"] !== false ||
    strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "slackbot"] !== false ||
    strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "vkShare"] !== false ||
    strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "W3C_Validator"] !== false ||
    strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "Facebot") !== false
) {
    //render your server rendered markup for bots
} else {
    //render your SPA
}

put this in your theme's index.php

reference: https://gist.github.com/thoop/8165802 and https://prerender.io/documentation/install-middleware

[cr101]

@viankakrisna Thank you, I'll give that a go.