Wallace Theme has been featured in WP Tavern as an Angular 2 JS based driven theme with use of the latest REST API. Given the move to the Facebook React JavaScript framework, this is a major implementation alternative touted for its great speed. And if you go to the Wallace Demo website or to our website using the Wallace theme it is indeed fast – averaging 2.3 second load time in the Tools.pingdom.com tests from New York City and Dallas Texas.
One could see some of the reasons for this fast response – the home page list of posts was lazy-loaded. And Wallace does not support menus or sidebars. However when we reverted to the Beaver Theme the average response time dropped to 1.7 seconds. Even more disconcerting was the fact that popular plugins like Foo Gallery, Cyclone Slider, etc would not diplay or work in Wallace:
So truly Wallace is in beta mode. The key here is the combo of the REST API + Angular 2 JavaScript framework is going to provide a technical rival to React.js based Calypso. Based on the slowdown on the Calypso juggernaut in Matt Mullenweg’s State of Word 2016 in early December of this year; Wallace may be another approach. Not a bad deal for WordPress future.