Book Image

Learning WordPress REST API

By : Sufyan bin Uzayr, Mathew Rooney
Book Image

Learning WordPress REST API

By: Sufyan bin Uzayr, Mathew Rooney

Overview of this book

The WordPress REST API is a recent innovation that has the potential to unlock several new opportunities for WordPress developers. It can help you integrate with technologies outside of WordPress, as well as offer great flexibility when developing themes and plugins for WordPress. As such, the REST API can make developers’ lives easier. The book begins by covering the basics of the REST API and how it can be used along with WordPress. Learn how the REST API interacts with WordPress, allowing you to copy posts and modify post metadata. Move on to get an understanding of taxonomies and user roles are in WordPress and how to use them with the WordPress REST API. Next, find out how to edit and process forms with AJAX and how to create custom routes and functions. You will create a fully-functional single page web app using a WordPress site and the REST API. Lastly, you will see how to deal with the REST API in future versions and will use it to interact it with third-party services. By the end of the book, you will be able to work with the WordPress REST API to build web applications.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning WordPress REST API
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

HTTP API in WordPress


As the name suggests, in WordPress, the HTTP API can be used to simplify HTTP requests. It can let you make HTTP requests via PHP, either to the same site or to a different site. But more importantly, HTTP API in WordPress lets you transform URL strings into JSON objects.

Consider the following URL string: http://example.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts.

It is like any other URL on the Internet. Now, with HTTP API, we can convert it into a JSON object, making use of the wp_remote_get () function from the WordPress core:

$json = wp_remote_get ( 'http://example.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts' ); 

Now, $json will yield an array, and that is precisely the response that we need.

To understand it better, let us now put together a very small function that accepts a URL string and then gives an array of post objects:

$response = wp_remote_get( $url ); 
function get_json( $url ) { 
//GET remote site 
$response = wp_remote_get( $url ); 
//Checking for errors 
if ( is_wp_error...