K. Adam White 5:02 pm on August 16, 2018  

REST API chat summary: August 9

This post summarizes the REST APIREST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/. component team chat from August 9 (agenda, Slack archive).

5.0 Priorities

The REST API team’s primary goal for the next major releasemajor release A release, identified by the first two numbers (3.6), which is the focus of a full release cycle and feature development. WordPress uses decimaling count for major release versions, so 2.8, 2.9, 3.0, and 3.1 are sequential and comparable in scope. is to support the GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ team. There are still a number of REST API-related issues open in the Gutenberg merge proposal milestone; we always welcome assistance in getting these taken care of.

Issues that were raised as needing eyes and opinions:

  • #44758 (handling user’s localeLocale A locale is a combination of language and regional dialect. Usually locales correspond to countries, as is the case with Portuguese (Portugal) and Portuguese (Brazil). Other examples of locales include Canadian English and U.S. English. in REST API responses)
  • #39953 (handling dates on draft posts)
  • gutenberg#8683 and gutenberg#2457 (supporting Gutenberg use with custom controllers and REST routes outside of the wp/v2 namespace)

Outside of Gutenberg, the two major areas of development we aim to tackle are

  • further improvements to the APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways.’s support for metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.,
  • and authentication.

Meta Handling

Following the register_meta improvements in 4.9.8, we wish to continue improving the state of meta handling and registration within the REST API.

  • @flixos90 will be re-opening the discussion around how to register complex meta values (e.g. permitting associative arrays instead of just integers, strings and the like). See #43392.
  • #43941 (support default values for registered meta) has clear potential benefits to users and will also be prioritized.
  • @spacedmonkey and others are driving additional tickets which could benefit meta handling, including #44387 & #44238.

Authentication

We aim to release a tested version of the OAuth 2.0 pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party to the plugin repository by the end of the year. This will greatly assist application developers who wish to integrate their WordPress site with external applications. We are also interested in pursuing a basic auth solution within coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. (see discussion in #42790).

As @rmccue is currently unavailable to lead development in this area, we are opening a call for a lead contributor to the REST API authentication plugins. We need somebody to own the vision for how external applications should authenticate with WordPress.

Agenda for today’s meeting

The REST API team will be meeting shortly (now, in fact…) in #core-restapi for our regular weekly meeting at 2018-08-16T17:00 UTC. As always, if you have a REST API related ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. you would like to bring to the component team’s attention, please join us or leave a note in the #core-restapi channel. Hope to see you all later today!