Use of plugins in Atlas Headless

Hi,
I am new to the Headless space. I am trying to understand how the headless Atlas system works.

Can we still continue using plugins for functionalities like Gravity Forms, Woocoomerce, Yoast SEO, Rev Slider plugins, etc?

The simple answer is “yes” and the more nuanced answer is “sort-of.”

In a headless WP setup, the templating system isn’t really used – instead that’s some sort of JS client app which gets the pieces of content from the WordPress api.

“Headless” sites in general don’t care about the nature of that API, and so you could use the WP Rest API as the place where your client-side app is getting the content. However, Atlas is a little more opinionated and sets up the WP GraphQL plugin.

You ask about if you can continue using traditional WordPress plugins – There’s nothing stopping you from installing those plugins, and most of the more popular plugins will have some made some sort of effort to get their functionality added to those API endpoints (either REST api, or WPGraphQL endpoint)

I think that Yoast has this good article around SEO and Headless, with a specific section on using headless with Yoast:

Additionally, for more info on Atlas specific things, you should definitely take a look at the DevRel resources, especially since one of the recently published articles discusses Gravity Forms!