WP REST API: 2.0 Beta 13 & Roadmap

Hi folks! I’m here with another exciting update from the API team.

Beta 13

First off, we’re excited to announce 2.0 Beta 13 “yoink.adios\losers” is now available. Grab it from the plugins repo or GitHub while it’s hot. Here’s some of the key updates:

• BREAKING CHANGE: Fix Content-Disposition header parsing. This technically breaks backwards compatibility to correctly match the header specification. (#2239)

• BREAKING CHANGE: Use compact links for embedded responses if they are available. We now use CURIEs for sites on 4.5+, which look like wp:term (but canonicalise to the full URI relation). (#2412)

• Updated JS client to the latest version. (#2403)

There’s lots more changes in this release; check out the release notes or the commits for this release.

Roadmap

We’ve been thinking about how to tackle the API in the coming future. We want to do the most we can to ensure you can build sites with confidence.

Along these lines, we’re going to release a 2.0 final version in the coming months. This will be a completely stable release with guaranteed backwards compatibility for the foreseeable future. This backwards compatibility ensures that your sites can remain up-to-date with minimal maintenance or issues with upgrading.

We originally held the software in beta for a long period to ensure that breaking changes could be rolled in if deemed necessary to move the project forward. However, the majority of these breaks occurred at the start of the 2.0 lifecycle, and the API is mostly stable at this point. Keeping the ability to break compatibility benefits only us, whereas moving to a stable release benefits everyone.

Moving forward, version 2.0 of the WP REST API will follow a normal project release cycle. We will have minor releases in the 2.x series as new features are added, and bugfix releases in the 2.0.x series.

As for the core merge itself, we are not submitting a merge proposal of the core endpoints for WordPress 4.6. We believe endpoints for the main WordPress objects (posts, users, comments, terms, and taxonomies) are not enough to garner the support needed for the proposal to be accepted. Our hope is that with a stable version 2.0 release, we will attract our community members that have been waiting for the endpoints to be available in core, and submit a merge proposal for the WordPress 4.7 release cycle.

In addition to attracting more developers within our community, we are also looking to get more contributors involved with the project. As noted in previous discussions, the four of us on the API team can’t keep pace with WordPress itself without help. We’re looking to get WordPress core component maintainers involved in their relevant components, as well as new developers from outside the project. Moving forward, the API team sees our role as advisory over the API itself, with the API treated as an integral part of the component rather than maintained by a separate team. We’re also going to continue to work on our feature plugins (metadata, site/multisite, menus/widgets, and authentication) in parallel, and are looking for help on these as well. (There’s also more news regarding authentication coming very soon.)

If you’d like to get involved with the API, please let us know. You can comment here, ping us on Slack in the #core-restapi room, or via GitHub issues. We’re looking at spending significant time onboarding new users, so if you’d like to get involved, now’s the time! Our weekly meeting is at Monday 23:00 UTC

Thanks for catching up with us, and have a wonderful day.

With love,

Ryan, Rachel, Daniel, and Joe

WP REST API: 2.0 Beta 13 & Roadmap by Ryan McCue was originally posted at https://make.wordpress.org/core/2016/04/04/wp-rest-api-2-0-beta-13-roadmap/