neocorner.fr

Neocorner

A French restaurant-group site built twice in Next.js/Floweden, then wired to headless WordPress — and I built both halves: the host-side WordPress theme as well as the frontend. WordPress serves Gutenberg blocks over WPGraphQL and a custom React block renderer maps each block to my own animated component, so the client edits content in WordPress while the animated Next.js frontend renders it untouched.

frontend react.jshosting self-hostedcustom wordpress theme

A project that went through two distinct technical phases — and the challenge of the second was to make it indistinguishable from the first.

Phase 1 — Next.js + Headless WordPress

The site was initially built with Next.js and styled with Tailwind CSS, using WordPress as a headless content source. This gave full control over the front-end architecture: routing, rendering, component structure, and a rich set of scroll-driven animations and UI interactions built directly into the React layer.

Phase 2 — Full WordPress Migration

The site was later moved entirely into WordPress to give the client direct CMS control over layout and content without a decoupled front end. The core challenge was carrying everything from Phase 1 into the WordPress environment without regression — not just the visual styles, but all the interaction patterns and animation behaviors that had been built in React.

This required a purpose-built approach: a fully custom WordPress theme structured with custom theme parts, custom shortcodes for reusable content blocks, and custom Elementor widgets to replicate the component-level flexibility of the original React architecture. The Tailwind CSS system was integrated into the theme build pipeline, preserving the design language and utility class structure from the original codebase.

neocorner.fr