Skip to main content

FaustWP Plugin Headless Settings

The Headless page of the FaustWP Plugin (located within the WP Admin Settings Sidebar) allows you to customize the behavior of the plugin by configuring certain features. We explain those features in detail:

Features Explained​

The following options are available to enable/disabled based on your requirements:

Disabling WordPress theme admin pages​

This option is controlled by the Disable WordPress theme admin pages checkbox. When enabled it removes certain wp-admin menu items that aren't supported in a headless environment. For example, it will remove the following menu items:

  • Appearance > Themes
  • Appearance > Theme Editor
  • Appearance > Widgets
  • Appearance > Customize

It will also remove any features that require the Customizer which means that the Appearance tab will only contain the menu options.

If you still want to have access to those pages then, you can disable this setting.

Enabling Post and Category URL rewrites​

This option is controlled by the Enable Post and Category URL rewrites checkbox. When enabled it will perform domain replacement of all terms, post, preview, category links from your WordPress URL into your headless Front-end site URL by using relevant link filters.

For example if your WP WordPress URL is http://example.com and your Front-end site URL is http://headless.com then it will replace all post/page/category links to point to the headless Front-end site URL:

http://example.com/posts/category/recipes/ -> http://headless.com/posts/category/recipes/

If you don't want this replacement to happen then you can disable this option which will prevent the original content links from pointing to the headless url.

NOTE: It is recommended to keep this setting enabled so that all links will be properly served by the headless site.

Enabling public route redirects​

This option is controlled by the Enable public route redirects checkbox. When enabled it will redirect any public API requests to your WordPress URL into your headless Front-end site URL by using the template_redirect filter.

For example if your WP WordPress URL is http://example.com and your Front-end site URL is http://headless.com then if you visit any page on your WordPress URL will be redirected to the headless Front-end site URL passing any query params as well:

http://example.com/posts/welcome-to-the-gutenberg-editor/ -> http://headless.com/posts/welcome-to-the-gutenberg-editor

If you don't want this redirect to happen then you can disable this option which allows you to access the original WP site.

Using the WordPress domain for media URLs in post content​

This option is controlled by the Use the WordPress domain for media URLs in post content checkbox and is disabled by default. When enabled it will perform a src and srcset replacement of all media urls of the sites post/page content using the the_content filter to point back to the WordPress URL domain.

For example, if your WP WordPress URL is http://example.com and your Front-end site URL is http://headless.com then any images served from headless Front-end site URL will be rewritten to point to the WordPress URL:

http://headless.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/bird.png -> http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/bird.png

This happens when a user migrates a classical WP site a root domain of example.com to headless.com (to allow their headless front-end to be served from example.com and pull data from the WP instance that was moved to headless.com) then all media URLs in post content will be wrong.

If for example you uploaded images to the post content their image srcs will still point to example.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/bird.png, resulting in a 404 because the WP instance no longer lives at example.com.

You can enable this option to allow having the media content served by the classical WP site a root domain and when you switch the live domain to headless, you should disable the option to replace those links worrying about missing media.

NOTE: When moving your site to a new domain it is recommended to perform a search/replace on your website’s database. This is to ensure all hard-coded references of the old domain in your database point to your live production domain instead. Read more about search/replace