Headless CP - suggestion about plugins

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It so happens that I built a solution for exactly the goal @Simone wants to achieve. It’s pretty simple and straight forward. This is a theme-driven technique that bypasses the need for 3rd party plugins or complicated solutions.

Getting Started

Get your update domain setup with a fresh install of ClassicPress and a security plugin of your choice. From there, install the Update Manager plugin and create a first endpoint to test with. I used a subdomain for mine.

Custom Theme

Since you (presumably) won’t be publicly serving anything except plugin update endpoints, your theme can consist of a simple index.php file. Give the directory whatever name you like. Here’s the important bits from my own file. Set this as your active theme.

<?php

// Prevent direct access.
if (!defined('ABSPATH')) {
	die();
}

// Redirect all requests to the homepage.
if ($_SERVER['SCRIPT_URL'] !== '/') {
	header('Location: https://your.updateserver.com');
	exit;
}

// Page content.
?>
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en-US">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<meta name="description" content="Update Server for Code Potent Plugins">
<meta name="generator" content="Code Potent">
<link rel="icon" href="https://static.codepotent.com/images/logotype/code-potent-logotype-lettermark-64x64.png">
</head>
<body>
<p>This content displays on every frontend page.</p>
<p>Add branding, some trendy JS effect, or just use a blank page.</p>
</body>
</html>

Permalinks

Set your permalink structure to Post name. This ensures that any 404s are routed through your theme’s index file.

Config File

Optional: You can shave a few extra nanoseconds off requests by adding the following at the very top of your wp-config.php file, just inside the opening PHP tag. This directive ensures that your domain (as a whole) is compressed for all frontend requests (much like how you compress images, scripts, styles via .htaccess.)

if (!strstr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/wp-admin/')) {
	ob_start("ob_gzhandler");
}

Additional Notes

  • Are my endpoints faster when served from the subdomain? Yes.
  • I couldn’t get this working with the SHORTINIT constant; this would make it even faster.
  • Here are a slew of htaccess directives to further improve domain performance.
  • Do test your update endpoints from both the old and new domains for comparison.
  • It took longer to write this post than to set the whole thing up.

Wrapping Up

Using the above, my implementation serves up a JS-animated logo for all requests, unless the request is for an update endpoint. I still have full access to the backend and have used htpasswd for an extra layer of security over the login and admin.

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