Remember when server-side rendering was just rendering?

Ahnii! Somewhere around 2016, "server-side rendering" stopped meaning "the server renders HTML." It started meaning "run your JavaScript framework on the server so it can produce the HTML that the browser will then throw away and rebuild." The industry just forgot what to call it after React came along. Waaseyaa's SSR package does the original thing. A request comes in. PHP resolves a template. Twig renders HTML. The server sends it back. No hydration step, no virtual DOM diffing, no 200MB node_modules folder for the privilege of generating a <div>. This post walks through how the rendering pipeline works: from request to HTML, with the entity renderer, field formatters, and theme chain loader that make it more than echo statements in a .php file. What the rendering pipeline actually does The entry point is SsrPageHandler::handleRenderPage(). It takes a path, an account, and an HTTP request. It returns an array with the rendered HTML, a status code, and headers. That's it. public