A Day of REST, the WordPress REST API conference

February 1, 2016
| WordPress Tips

Feeling RESTful in London

Ahhh London in January. It’s not usually the ideal place to spend a winter week, but there was something particularly special going on last week. January 28, 2016 marked the inaugural A Day of REST event, a new conference established to discuss how to build with the WordPress REST API. It was a one-track conference put on by Human Made, which started with an introduction to the API and ended with a deeper dive into specific use cases for implementation (my favorite concept of which was progressive enhancement).

The event was well attended by independent developers and agencies from across the globe.

Contribution day at A Day of REST

As if learning from the creators of and contributors to the WordPress REST API wasn’t enough, on Friday I (Frankie and Jonathan from GoDaddy) had the opportunity to spend some time participating in a contributor day focused specifically on the API. This specialized hack day (at Mozilla’s London office) presented a great opportunity to dive deep into the nuances of the API. In particular, I helped with documentation, logging differences between V2 and V1 documentation for the API, and my co-workers took a deeper look at the site endpoint for management of core settings.

Get started with the WP REST API

So what’s the WordPress REST API anyway?

The WordPress REST API is a revolution

There’s a revolution at foot in the WordPress world. One that removes barriers, opens the project even more, and creates a way for developers who have never worked with WordPress in their life (and those who are experienced WP devs), to create interesting, smart applications, plugins, themes, and integrations. The WordPress REST API is a game changer. It increases the marketability of the project, and expands the universe of developers capable of working with WordPress to those who are fluent in API dev.

Quick WordPress REST API question

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WordPress UX mixed with an API is powerful

It’s no secret that WordPress powers over 25% of the internet. Users love it for its simple UX, developers love it for its extensibility, and agencies love it for its ease of deployment and management. The WordPress UX paradigm has been successfully adopted.

What hasn’t always worked is the ability to easily integrate WordPress with other applications, frameworks, and technologies. Of course, given a single problem, 10 developers will find 20 different solutions. Anything is possible, but custom plugins or development work for special integrations costs time, money, and resources. The WordPress REST API (as of this article, in beta 2) is the elegant solution to the integration problem. It saves time, money, and resources by standardizing the way we use WordPress programmatically.