WP REST API Plugin jQuery Example

The goal of this code is to be the most succinct, easy-to-understand JavaScript example of using the WordPress REST API.

More information about the REST API.

Steps to use

1. Install the WordPress REST API (Version 2) plugin.
2. Clone this repo into your plugins directory.
3. Activate both the "WP REST API" and "REST API Plugin - JQuery Example" plugins.
4. Click the "REST API Example" admin menu.

Features

Client-side (within the browser)

All API calls are done from within your browser. This means you can use it to make rich web apps that load data in the background, and even offload many page hits from your server, decreasing your server load. All of this, while being more responsive and giving the the impression of a faster-loading user experience.

It uses jQuery

jQuery is the most common JavaScript tool to use for more complex browser code. It's one of the easiest ways to get started with JavaScript and is definitely the way to go if you're not using a larger-scale client-side framework like React, Angular, or Ember.

It's a Plugin

This code works within a WordPress plugin. If you follow the pattern, you can make your own WordPress plugin with a rich client experience.

Public and Authenticated calls

There are examples of public calls and ones that use cookie/nonce authentication.

More info about authentication.

Bonus: Multiple Language Support!

Given that we all tend to pattern greatly off of example code, I've added support to this plugin for Internationalization (i18n). This is to encourage folks to make their plugins i18n-ready. When you write your own code similar to the i18n code I've added to this plugin, it will allow someone who installs your plugin to add translation files for different languages and have all strings translated within the plugin (including JavaScript code!)

While this does add a little bit of complexity to the code, it's well worth it. WordPress is a very international software platform, so we should all do what we can to make our plugins accessible to the non-English speaking community!

More information about i18n in WordPress

How to update translation strings:

Whenever you add a new translate string, you'll need to re-generate the .pot file.

1. Install node/npm if you haven't got it already.
2. Install grunt-cli if you haven't already: npm install -g grunt-cli
3. Run grunt makepot to generate the new .pot file.

Things intentionally not covered here

Search Result Pagination

When you do a REST API call to get a list of things like posts, pages, users, etc. you don't get all of them if there are a lot to be had. You'll want to get only as many as you need to display, and then either show links to more pages, or you can dynamically load more as you scroll.

I didn't add this because I wanted to focus the code on the initial API calls, and folks will likely want to implement pagination in their own way.

Post Statuses

There's actually a REST API call to get the list of possible Statuses. However, this would clutter up the example more, without really adding much functionality. However, If I were to do something like this in a real plugin, I would definitely fetch the statuses before using them.

Minifying

For a real plugin, you'll want to minify your JavaScript via a build system such as Grunt, Gulp, Webpack, Browserify, or perhaps another way.

As you can see, there are many ways to do this, so I leave it up as an exercise for the viewer.

Linting

Linting is a process that checks your code for syntax and formatting issues. It's a really good idea to do this in a project that matters. You can plug in ESLint or JSHint easily using whatever build system you choose above.

Unit Testing

Unit Testing is another practice that helps you write and maintain solid code.

Mocha and Jasmine are the most popular JavaScript testing frameworks as of this writing, and PHPUnit is most widely used for PHP code.