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Soames Plugin

WordPress as headless CMS

Enables the Soames Astro Theme

Soames is one WordPress plugin and one static front end. The plugin turns a normal WordPress install into a headless CMS that handles the following for your site.

Settings
Gutenberg blocks
Knowledge Base
Previews
WPGraphQL fields the front end queries
Redirect that sends anyone who lands on WordPress itself over to your published site

Download the Soames plugin

This link always serves the most recent release, so it never goes out of date and there is no version number to remember. Every release, with its notes, is listed on the releases page.

Before you install

Before you install the Soames plugin, make sure you have the following.

WordPress 6.5 or newer, running PHP 7.4 or newer.
WPGraphQL, installed and activated first. Soames declares it as a required plugin, so WordPress will refuse to activate Soames without it.
A place to put the front end. Soames publishes to a static Astro site built with the soames-astro-theme package. Any host that can run a build and serve static files will do.

Installing

The order matters: WordPress will not let you activate Soames before WPGraphQL.

Install WPGraphQL. In wp-admin, go to Plugins → Add New, search for “WPGraphQL”, then install and activate it.
Install the Soames plugin. Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the soames-wordpress-plugin.zip you downloaded above, install, then activate. A new Soames menu appears in the sidebar.
Point Soames at your site. Under Soames → Settings, set the Frontend Site URL to your published site, for example https://example.com. The redirect and the preview button both use this, so nothing works properly until it is set. From here on, visiting your WordPress address sends you to your Soames site — that is deliberate, and you can switch it off with the Front-end redirection checkbox just below while you are setting things up.
Optional: rebuild on publish. Still under Soames → Settings, paste a Build hook URL from your host. Soames will POST to it whenever you publish or update content, so the site rebuilds itself. Leave it empty and you can rebuild by hand instead — the settings page has a Deploy now button either way.

Which versions go together

The plugin and the front-end theme are two halves of one contract: the plugin emits the block markup, the theme renders it. Keep them in step, or blocks added on one side will render as empty space on the other.

Soames plugin	soames-astro-theme (npm)
1.0.0 or newer	0.1.18 or newer

Soames 1.0.0 folded the old companion theme into the plugin, so there is only one thing to install. If you are upgrading from 0.9.0 you can simply deactivate that theme — the plugin takes over the redirect on its own.

Updating

Updates are manual, on purpose. Soames is not distributed through the WordPress.org plugin directory, so it does not appear in your dashboard’s update list and nothing will prompt you. To update: download the plugin again using the button above, upload it the same way you did the first time, and choose Replace current with uploaded when WordPress asks. Your settings and content are untouched.

It is worth checking the releases page now and then, and updating the front-end theme package at the same time when the release notes call for it.

Source and licence

Soames is open source!

Plugin source — including the changelog.
Companion theme source — retired in Soames 1.0.0, kept for reference only.
Astro theme source, published to npm as soames-astro-theme.
Everything is licensed GPL-2.0-or-later, the same licence as WordPress itself.

New to Soames? Start with the Knowledge Base, which covers setup and how to use each block.