A Day of Rest : Boston

Workshop Notes

• Auth and the WordPress API
• WooCommerce API
• Intro to React

Conference Notes:

Joe Hoyle - Diving into REST API - Slides

• Magic "_links" shows relations to the requested object
• /post/123?_embed returns a richer post object with the relations included in _embedded
• API has a robust Schema, helps with client side validation, etc
• Auth
  • Cookie - for apps/additions within an existing WordPress site
  • Basic - server to server applications
  • OAuth 1 - user giving access to the system to act on their behalf. oauth1.wp-api.org
  • Brokered - for when you've built a system that needs to register an OAuth type app and get creds with a user's site. Acts like OAuth after the initial setup.
  • Oauth2 - possible if you know there will be SSL (otherwise same use case as Oauth1)
  • apps.wp-api.org/spec
  • apps.wp-api.org/app_developers
• Client Libraries
  • Backbone Core Client
  • wordpress-rest-api-oauth-1
  • wpapi NodeJS / Browser
• Developing
  • register_rest_route
  • show_in_rest
  • register_meta
  • WP_REST_Controller

Phil Sturgeon - API Tales of Woe and Woah! - Slides

• Don't use GET for a delete - crawler might delete all your stuff
• Be error heavy when developing an API
• API shouldn't just be an HTTP interface to SQL
• Runscope - request/response logging tool
• JSON API documentation formatting
• HTTP status dogs
• Don't just worry about the happy path, code for the errors
• Instead of assuming a particular response, check for it, then deal with it or deal with the unexpected response.
• Swagger - API documenter
• Packagist.org/packages/koine/strong-parameters
• VCR stubs instead of static stubs
• Apisyouwonthate.com coupon:wordpress
• Has new book for front end devs that use APIs
• GraphUL or GraphQL? Compare to rest

Adam Silverstein - Backbone - Wordpress REST API - Slides

• Backbone added in 3.5
• More and more features, mostly admin, moving to backbone
• Context:edit if we want rendered content as it requires authentication
• Vs React
  • Pros
    • Backbone
      • Separation of concerns
      • Event/listener system
      • Sync
      • Templates
      • Built in to WordPress
      • Stable, lightweight, fast
      • Includes underscore
    • React
      • Reusable/Composable component architecture
      • JSX easy to write
      • Component lifecycles events
      • Rich module ecosystem
      • Redux - smarter models
      • React Router
      • Create React App
      • Wicked Fast
  • Cons
    • Backbone
      • No central state management
      • Inner-app communications
      • Too flexible
      • Difficult to reason about
      • Tricky to debug
      • Didn't scale well
      • Complex views no nesting
      • Marionette
    • React
      • Hard to get started
      • Constant churn
      • Docs out of date
      • Heavy
      • Debugging builds
• Examples
  • WAMU.org - react front end, backbone admin
  • NYTimes Journeys - backbone
• Tunedin.net
• Starter themes - React 2016, Us2 hoping to open source WAMU

Kelly Dwan - Reacting to WordPress - Slides

• Virtual dom compared to real Dom only changes are written to DOM
• Addons
  • Webpack - packager / runner
  • Babel
  • Npm
  • Flux - standard for handling data in an app
  • Redux - a bit different approach than flux
    • Egghead.io/redux
  • React Router
  • Node
  • Create React App
• Who's using react
  • Jetpack admin side
  • Foxhound - react theme
  • Wordpress-rest-api-oauth-1 - npmjs.org/ryelle
  • Wordcamp Us - social media stream
• Accessibility
  • Web aim
• Serverside Rendering -isomorphic
• Calypso extensions - ryelle.codes/calypso-extensions

John Eckman (CEO 10up) - 10 REST API Use Cases - Slides

• Headless - themes/apps not tied to WordPress theme system
  • Pace layering -change front end more often than back end
  • Dynamic applike experience
• Multi-headed
  • customized experience for different audiences
• Infrastructure
  • WordPress as a microservice
  • Create content in WordPress consume it anywhere
• In-Site Content
  • Load more
  • Filtered search
  • Related stories
  • Sponsored content /native ads
• Cross-site content
  • Syndication across a network
  • Pull based on taxonomy
  • Admin experience to push content to another site you have access to
• Improved authoring experience
  • Creating complex content types
  • Infrequent user firms
• Improved editor
• Integrating other services
  • Google docs
• Integration with mobile apps
• Integration with desktop apps

Mel Choyce personal site - a design perspective on rest api - Slides

• Quartz - neat site
• Concerns
  • Mobile App Design
    • Apple HID
    • Android Material
  • Interaction Design
    • Button clicks
    • Dragging items
  • Disney's 12 basic principals of animation
  • How can dev help
    • Early talk about requirements
    • What's easier to do with the API now

Petra Raykovsky - Great Expectations - Slides

• Discuss with clients how things will change when you build a site using the rest API.
  • Some admin features they are used to may go away

Rachel Baker - Real Time REST API - Slides

speakersdeck.com/RachelBaker/real-time-rest-api-with-wordpress

• How can the client know if anything changes?
  • Cases
    • Letting a visitor know there's a new post
    • Cache busting
  • Webhooks + WordPress actions
  • Resthooks - resthooks.org/docs
    • Needs
      • Mechanism to store subscriptions
      • CRUD endpoints for subs
    • Gotchas
      • Error handling and/or retrying
      • Performance issues in real time, maybe delayed queue instead
      • Impact of payload size
      • Security and auth
      • You now have an RPC api

K. Adam White - API client API design - Slides

Ben Foxall - http kind of sucks - Slides

• Why it sucks
  • Was designed with wires in mind
  • Need to be constantly online
  • Can't get a response without request
• IoT + WordPress
  • MQTT message queue telemetry transport
    • Stateful
    • Message based
    • Binary
• Emqtt
• Puck.js
• Espruino
• Nophone
• bitly.com/ADORB

Random Things from My Notes

• Test 262
• Joke: Swiss Army Hammer vs American Armie Hammer
• Skunk Works - Nicholas Means

Other Links That Came Up in One Session or Another

• https://github.com/mzabriskie/axios <-- alternative to JQuery AJAX
• https://yarnpkg.com/en/ <-- alternative/wrapper to NPM
• https://zeit.co/blog/next <-- don't remember why I noted this
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/n <-- alternative to nvm