As WordPress matures towards becoming a fully-fledged application framework, the tooling surrounding the platform continues to come on in leaps and bounds. Over the last three years in particular, developers have moved quickly to embrace best practices which have long since been standard in other platforms. A big part of that overall push has involved fine-tuning approaches to local development environments. We’ve covered classic approaches such as local LAMP installations and experimenting with Vagrant here on the blog before, but one solution, in particular, is gaining an increasing amount of ground – Docker. In this piece, we’ll introduce Docker as a technology, […]
5 World-Class APIs To Consider Integrating Into Your Next WordPress Project
As the REST API begins opening WordPress up to a wider programmatic world, now is a great time to start getting familiar with best-in-breed examples of third-party APIs across the web. Kicking the tires of these APIs will kill two birds with one stone – you’ll get familiar with standard best practices and also widen your horizons in terms of what you can integrate WordPress with on your next project. Though there’s considerable debate about exactly what constitutes a truly great API, the examples we’ve highlighted in this piece are widely agreed to be among the best in the business. […]
Developing A REST API App – Part 6: Exploring The Web With Third-Party APIs
We’ve come a long way so far in our six-part REST API series. From pretty much a standing start, we’ve managed to introduce the basic concepts of the technology, and get a small interactive app up and running (with a little help from React). Along the way, we’ve hopefully proven that even non-technical WordPress users can already start getting their feet wet with the programmatic power behind the next generation of the platform. The future of WordPress is not going to be about tiny Thoreau quote apps, however. It’s going to largely centre around how the REST API helps WordPress smoothly integrate […]
Developing A REST API App – Part 5: Adding Custom Endpoints And Extra Touches
In the last part of our series, we stepped through building the basics of our app using Facebook’s React, and put together a simple solution where users could serve up nuggets of timeless wisdom on demand. This time around, we’ll concentrate on two main areas: adding a custom endpoint back in our WordPress site to make life a little easier when we’re delivering large amounts of quotations, and adding some small extra touches on the front end back in React. As a quick reminder of the overall setup, so far we’ve got a local WordPress install running at http://walden.dev/ and […]
Developing a REST API App – Part 4: Creating Our React-Powered WordPress Site
In the last installment of our REST API App series, we started looking at the front end part of the puzzle and selected React as the solution we’d be running with. The reasons why were simple: it’s speedy, well-documented, and enjoys the support of one of the largest players in the business, Facebook. In order to check that we could get WordPress and React talking to each other, we downloaded the React Starter Kit locally and cobbled together a quick API call to display some arbitrary data from our local WordPress install. Though our test worked, we didn’t exactly go to […]
Developing A REST API App – Part 3: Choosing And Testing A Front End Solution
So far in our series, we’ve loaded some data into WordPress to play with and made sure we can access it via the REST API. Along the way, we’ve introduced a number of core concepts and simple tools you can use to start experimenting yourself, even if you’re not a tech whizz. This time around, it’s time to consider how we might go about handling things on the front end. We need a nice framework we can use to pull data out of WordPress via the REST API and display it. It’s almost certainly going to involve a JavaScript-powered solution. But which […]
Developing A REST API App – Part 2: Adding And Testing Our Data
Following on from our introductory article, it’s now time to get down to business in our REST API series and start actually building the foundations of our eventual app. We’ll kick things off by getting some core data into a local install of WordPress, and then start exploring some background concepts and the general set of options available to us. We’ll do this by testing the basic reading and writing functionality of the REST API with the help of some handy tools which make it easy for non-technical users to follow along. By the end of this session, we should […]
Developing a REST API App – Part 1: Getting Started
Excitement over the REST API has been building for what seems like an eternity, but we’re still pretty much at the starting gate in terms of what it’s actually going to mean for site owners and developers once it finally lands. Though I’ve written extensively about the potential implications of the REST API, I’ve been holding back on actually diving in and getting my hands dirty to date. With the REST API finally taxiing on the runway, now seemed a great time to grasp that nettle and really start digging into detail. Over the course of this series, I’ll be […]
Can VersionPress 3.0 Convince As An Open-Source Project?
Version control is a non-negotiable part of any serious development project, but widespread adoption of this technique in the world of WordPress has been somewhat spotty to date. While the platform’s core has used Subversion for some time, sites out in the wild are often put together with little or no version control in place. VersionPress arrived on the scene in 2014 with a vision of bringing an integrated WordPress version control solution to the masses. It’s been making steady progress in that direction ever since, and the software’s recent transition into a free open source project marks an interesting inflection […]
4 Exciting New Revenue Routes The REST API Opens Up
With the WordPress REST API still staggering towards the finishing line, now is a great time to dust off the crystal ball and consider how developers might actually go about making money through its commercial use in the future. The next few years promises to bring a flood of new talent into the WordPress ecosystem, cementing the platform’s place as the dominant publishing platform online. We’re still in the early days of this next stage, but it’s already obvious that a much wider world of opportunity is potentially opening up to skilled developers. In this piece, we’ll whet your appetite […]
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