Corcel – Use WordPress backend with Laravel or any PHP application

I once did that for a client of mine.

I took the WordPress-based / WooCommerce system and split it into 1) the Shopify system for admin stuff and also the whole payment system and 2) the "frontend" i.e. the consumer facing part BEFORE the payment (I used Symfony, similar to Laravel, but more modular and I was more familiar with it). Theoretically you could fetch all the product data via the Shopify API and then sync it automagically. But in the first iteration, we just copied some of the basic product data into a simple Symfony Admin backend and made a simple javascript-based checkout slide-out, and only when they were ready to pay, they would be forwarded to Shopify.

This way we would have full control of the user experience up to the point of purchase, and then Shopify would take over. I thought this was the best way I can deliver a performant website, while also being able to sleep well, because all the money stuff and all the customer data is handled by Shopify.

I was able to increase search engine traffic by 30% this way, reduce page size and increase page speeds and revenue increased significantly.

After 3 years, he decided he wanted to make it more "professional", so he fired me, I got none of the credit ("the search engine traffic must be because of better branding - and the page isn't up to my standards of aesthetics... yes, the designers who were supposed to deliver the designs kept stalling and delivered NOTHING and you had to just create something on the fly before the main selling season, and yes we had huge sales gains on the website and more traffic, but this was not because of the website"... they didn't change any of the marketing or any of their strategies, by the way.) So they hired an agency team with a project manager, designer, developer, marketing person; who then asked me to give them the source code from git so they can upload the code to their FTP server (!).

And they pretty much didn't change anything for a few years, everything looked the same. After like 4-5 years, they adjusted the design a bit, but still looked VERY similar.

Anyone know of something similar but for interfacing with a Drupal database?

How's Corcel different to using WP's own API? What are the pros / cons?

Useless. WP has a very good REST API

Ah, if between the 2, perhaps, Astro web framwork is what I could build a small e-commerce quickly with minimal code in TypeScript, Tailwind and lots of copy and paste UI. Prior to Astro, I was spent months solving the differences codebase on frontend and backend. So anyway, we are in the same timezone.