Introducing Presscomet

WordPress runs a huge share of the web for good reasons. The admin is familiar to millions of editors, the content model is flexible, and almost every integration speaks its REST API. What people struggle with is everything underneath: PHP version upgrades, plugin vulnerabilities, a MySQL server to babysit, and a stack of caching plugins to make pages fast.

Presscomet keeps the first list and drops the second. It is a rewrite of WordPress’s behaviour in TypeScript on Next.js 16, React 19 and SQLite, with three goals.

1. Nobody should notice the switch

The admin is a screen-by-screen reproduction of WordPress 6.8: the same menus, list tables, notices, settings pages and wording. The block editor saves standard block markup. Permalinks, feeds, sitemaps and /wp-json/wp/v2 keep their paths. Users log in with the passwords they already have.

2. Moving should take one click

The migrator reads a live site, a WXR file, an SQL dump or a companion-plugin package. It imports content, users, menus, media and custom fields, matches active plugins to the 19 that ship built in, and captures the current theme so pages look identical on day one. There is a separate post on how that works.

3. Fast and boring to run

Public pages are rendered once and served as static HTML until something changes, at which point only the affected URLs are regenerated. The whole database is one file. If you don’t want a server at all, export the site to static files and host it for free.

What it is not

It does not execute PHP, so WordPress plugins and themes do not run; their common jobs are built in instead. It is not for WooCommerce stores. It is a 0.1 release, and we would rather you hear about the limits here than discover them later. The changelog lists them.

Try the admin demo, or install it and import a site.