Last night Farset Labs in Belfast hosted a small WordPress Meetup which covered use of the REST API in WordPress amongst other topics. At a previous meetup the introduction of the API as part of the WordPress core was mentioned and I was curious to see what what exactly was being exposed and how it could be used. Conor Woods did a great introduction to the REST API and presented a simple app showing the authentication handling required to allow post submission. The code for that is on github and a link to his article to get started is here.
A discussion of the use cases for REST followed and gave rise to a number of ideas – mainly around the new means of using WordPress as a platform. Ideas for lightweight mobile apps, new approaches to website design on WordPress and data collation were among those put forward. Ben Matthews of LeoDan Designs contributed a lot of useful technical information during the meetup and insights into the impact on SEO and performance of various plugins and approaches.
Other topics included the optimization of WordPress sites and the use of tools such as Cloudflare and Amazon S3 to improve delivery times. The importance given by Google to the speed of a site was also raised. A practical example of how to assess the delivery speed was given using PINGDOM
The wordpress.tv site and the Belfast Wordcamp from earlier this year featured for a number of the sessions (click here to go to them) given including Conor’s talk on the REST api. Also mentioned was Postman to aid in the understanding and interaction with Rest services.
As an attendee at a number of Meetups in Belfast this year – I have to say that by far the greatest amount of information transfer and ideas has been this one and I hope that the next follows in the same pattern.