Book Image

WordPress Development Quick Start Guide

By : Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake
Book Image

WordPress Development Quick Start Guide

By: Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake

Overview of this book

WordPress is the most used CMS in the world and is the ideal way to share your knowledge with a large audience or build a profitable business. Getting started with WordPress development has often been a challenge for novice developers, and this book will help you find your way. This book explains the components used in WordPress development, when and where to use them, and why you should be using each component in specific scenarios. You begin by learning the basic development setup and coding standards of WordPress. Then you move into the most important aspects of the theme and plugin development process. Here you will also learn how themes and plugins fit into the website while learning about a range of techniques for extending themes and plugins. With the basics covered, we explore many of the APIs provided by WordPress and how we can leverage them to build rapid solutions. Next, we move on to look at the techniques for capturing, processing, and displaying user data when integrating third-party components into the site design. Finally, you will learn how to test and deploy your work with secure and maintainable code, while providing the best performance for end users.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Building remote connections with REST API


WordPress REST API is gaining popularity over the old XML-RPC API and becoming a standard in site development. The API allows developers to connect WordPress sites with other sites as well as third-party applications. Modern sites are moving towards JS Framework-based frontends to optimize performance as well as to simplify the user experience. In such scenarios, developers can use WordPress as the backend for the core functionality and expose the data through the REST API to build frontends without using WordPress. The REST API could well be the future of development with WordPress.

The REST API was initially introduced in a external plugin for testing. Finally, it was included in WordPress core in WordPress 4.7, and now it fully supports REST API endpoints for all the major data models in WordPress.

Let's identify some of the common terms used in REST API operations:

  • Route: This is a well-defined URL that can be mapped to an HTTP method
  • Endpoint: The...