We’re happy to announce that we’ve open-sourced two projects last week: Delphin and its sibling, Delphin Bootstrap. Delphin powers get.blog, a site we built for a smooth registration of .blog domains. Delphin Bootstrap is a portable development environment for Delphin — it makes getting Delphin up and running easy on any operating system.
One of Delphin’s main goals was to simplify the process of registering and managing a domain. We’ve focused on the user experience, trying to avoid as much industry jargon as possible, while keeping in mind that purchasing a domain is just the first step in the journey toward a larger goal, like telling a story or selling products.
Delphin is a web application that uses parts of the WordPress.com API, as well as a few more specific endpoints built on the new WordPress REST API. Like Calypso — the WordPress.com front end — it is based on technologies such as React, Redux, and Webpack. We also used Delphin as a platform to experiment with new technologies including Yarn, Jest, CSS modules, and React Router. Some of these experiments will make it back to Calypso.
We wanted to share some of our findings:
- Yarn is a fantastic package manager. We had a few hiccups when we integrated it with CircleCI, but it now works smoothly.
- CSS modules was a great addition to this project, as it makes it possible to use semantic names for the CSS classes of components, instead of coming up with a convention to prevent namespace collisions in a global stylesheet.
- We ended up using a lot of wonderful tools and modules shared by the community.
At Automattic, we’ve been open-sourcing code for more than a decade now, and have more than 350 repositories on GitHub. We’re excited to add Delphin to this list, and welcome contributions, feedback, or reported issues!
