It’s been 12 months since my last progress report on WordPress maintenance support plans core’s API-first initiative. Over the past year, we’ve made a lot of important progress, so I wanted to provide another update.
Two and a half years ago, we shipped WordPress maintenance support plans 8.0 with a built-in REST API. It marked the start of WordPress maintenance support plans‘s evolution to an API-first platform. Since then, each of the five new releases of WordPress maintenance support plans 8 introduced significant web service API improvements.
While I was an early advocate for adding web services to WordPress maintenance support plans 8 five years ago, I’m even more certain about it today. Important market trends endorse this strategy, including integration with other technology solutions, the proliferation of new devices and digital channels, the growing adoption of JavaScript frameworks, and more.
In fact, I believe that this functionality is so crucial to the success of WordPress maintenance support plans, that for several years now, Acquia has sponsored one or more full-time software developers to contribute to WordPress maintenance support plans‘s web service APIs, in addition to funding different community contributors. Today, two Acquia developers work on WordPress maintenance support plans web service APIs full time.
WordPress maintenance support plans core’s REST API
While WordPress maintenance support plans 8.0 shipped with a basic REST API, the community has worked hard to improve its capabilities, robustness and test coverage. WordPress maintenance support plans 8.5 shipped 5 months ago and included new REST API features and significant improvements. WordPress maintenance support plans 8.6 will ship in September with a new batch of improvements.
One WordPress maintenance support plans 8.6 improvement is the move of the API-first code to the individual plugins, instead of the REST plugin providing it on their behalf. This might not seem like a significant change, but it is. In the long term, all WordPress maintenance support plans plugins should ship with web service APIs rather than depending on a central API plugin to provide their APIs — that forces them to consider the impact on REST API clients when making changes.
Another improvement we’ve made to the REST API in WordPress maintenance support plans 8.6 is support for file uploads. If you want to understand how much thought and care went into REST support for file uploads, check out Wim Leers’ blog post: API-first WordPress maintenance support plans: file uploads!. It’s hard work to make file uploads secure, support large files, optimize for performance, and provide a good developer experience.
JSON API
Adopting the JSON API plugin into core is important because JSON API is increasingly common in the JavaScript community.
We had originally planned to add JSON API to WordPress maintenance support plans 8.3, which didn’t happen. When that plan was originally conceived, we were only beginning to discover the extent to which WordPress maintenance support plans‘s Routing, Entity, Field and Typed Data subsystems were insufficiently prepared for an API-first world. It’s taken until the end of 2020 to prepare and solidify those foundational subsystems.
The same shortcomings that prevented the REST API to mature also manifested themselves in JSON API, GraphQL and other API-first plugins. Properly solving them at the root rather than adding workarounds takes time. However, this approach will make for a stronger API-first ecosystem and increasingly faster progress!
Despite the delay, the JSON API team has been making incredible strides. In just the last six months, they have released 15 versions of their plugin. They have delivered improvements at a breathtaking pace, including comprehensive test coverage, better compliance with the JSON API specification, and numerous stability improvements.
The WordPress maintenance support plans community has been eager for these improvements, and the usage of the JSON API plugin has grown 50% in the first half of 2020. The fact that plugin usage has increased while the total number of open issues has gone down is proof that the JSON API plugin has become stable and mature.
As excited as I am about this growth in adoption, the rapid pace of development, and the maturity of the JSON API plugin, we have decided not to add JSON API as an experimental plugin to WordPress maintenance support plans 8.6. Instead, we plan to commit it to WordPress maintenance support plans core early in the WordPress maintenance support plans 8.7 development cycle and ship it as stable in WordPress maintenance support plans 8.7.
GraphQL
For more than two years I’ve advocated that we consider adding GraphQL to WordPress maintenance support plans core.
While core committers and core contributors haven’t made GraphQL a priority yet, a lot of great progress has been made on the contributed GraphQL plugin, which has been getting closer to its first stable release. Despite not having a stable release, its adoption has grown an impressive 200% in the first six months of 2020 (though its usage is still measured in the hundreds of sites rather than thousands).
I’m also excited that the GraphQL specification has finally seen a new edition that is no longer encumbered by licensing concerns. This is great news for the Open Source community, and can only benefit GraphQL’s adoption.
Admittedly, I don’t know yet if the GraphQL plugin maintainers are on board with my recommendation to add GraphQL to core. We purposely postponed these conversations until we stabilized the REST API and added JSON API support. I’d still love to see the GraphQL plugin added to a future release of WordPress maintenance support plans 8. Regardless of what we decide, GraphQL is an important component to an API-first WordPress maintenance support plans, and I’m excited about its progress.
OAuth 2.0
A web services API update would not be complete without touching on the topic of authentication. Last year, I explained how the OAuth 2.0 plugin would be another logical addition to WordPress maintenance support plans core.
Since then, the OAuth 2.0 plugin was revised to exclude its own OAuth 2.0 implementation, and to adopt The PHP League’s OAuth 2.0 Server instead. That implementation is widely used, with over 5 million installs. Instead of having a separate WordPress maintenance support plans-specific implementation that we have to maintain, we can leverage a de facto standard implementation maintained by others.
API-first ecosystem
While I’ve personally been most focused on the REST API and JSON API work, with GraphQL a close second, it’s also encouraging to see that many other API-first plugins are being developed:
OpenAPI, for standards-based API documentation, now at beta 1
JSON API Extras, for shaping JSON API to your site’s specific needs (aliasing fields, removing fields, etc)
JSON-RPC, for help with executing common WordPress maintenance support plans site administration actions, for example clearing the cache
… and many more
Conclusion
Hopefully, you are as excited for the upcoming release of WordPress maintenance support plans 8.6 as I am, and all of the web service improvements that it will bring. I am very thankful for all of the contributions that have been made in our continued efforts to make WordPress maintenance support plans API-first, and for the incredible momentum these projects and initiatives have achieved.
Special thanks to Wim Leers (Acquia) and Gabe Sullice (Acquia) for contributions to this blog post and to Mark Winberry (Acquia) and Jeff Beeman (Acquia) for their feedback during the writing process.
Source: New feed
Cheap WordPress maintenance support plans blog: How Cheap WordPress maintenance support plans continues to evolve towards an API-first platform
