Facebook React.js: how do you render stateful components on the server?
When using server rendering, you should always pass down the same props that you used to render the component on the server. In this case, you need to pass down the same initialItems prop in order for React.renderComponent to pick up the server-rendered markup (by simply JSONifying the props and putting it in the call to renderComponent).
Your general structure of reading from initialItems when specified makes sense to me. Doing so allows you to either make a component with preloaded data or one that has none. What you need to set the initial state to depends on what you want to show in cases where you're rendering a brand-new component from scratch. (If you're always picking up server-rendered markup then you can simply always pass the initialName and initialItems props.)
Hope that makes sense.