Announcing the WP Austin REST Day!

Thanks to our Sponsor, WP Engine, the organizers of the Austin WordPress Meetup are please to announce a Special Event, the WP Austin REST Day. The WPATX community of developers and practitioners are getting excited about all the new possibilities of the WordPress REST API. It has been a while since we have hosted a WPATX Dev Day, and we thought a day devoted to discussion about faster, easier WordPress development using the REST API would be appreciated.

This event is designed for our WordPress Developer and Practitioner Community who want to learn how to use the WordPress REST API and explore some applications that are already using it.

WP Austin REST Day
June 17, 2016
9 am to 4 pm
WP Engine 10th Floor Classroom

The WP Engine classroom will open at 8:30 am and our WP Engine sponsors will be providing Breakfast Tacos and Coffee to help fuel you through the morning sessions, and lunch to power you through an afternoon of learning and doing.

The full WP Austin REST Day schedule has not been finalized, but we have posted the highlights and what you can expect from the day.

The day will open with a series of presentations by experienced WordPress Developers, who will discuss how the WordPress REST API will give our design and development community more flexibility when building sites, plugins, and themes. Our presenters will address new ways to interact with WordPress posts, users, comments, and taxonomies using the RESTful API standard, which will allow you to create, read, update, and delete the main WordPress objects and provides infrastructure for creating your own custom APIs. They will also discuss how the WordPress REST API can give us the opportunity to integrate with technologies currently outside the WordPress ecosystem.

As part of our WP Austin REST Day, we are putting together a WordPress REST API Resources Guide for our WPATX Developers and Practitioners.

The morning session will open with several 20-minute presentations.

Ryan Hoover will lead of the morning sessions off with:

Getting started with the REST API

• Get it installed on your site

• Access posts, comments, other information

• Incorporate it into your own site

Making your own REST API endpoint

• Give a walk through of the endpoint code structure

• Write an endpoint for getting a menu from the WP site

• Demonstration of a feature Ryan Hoover wrote for WP Engine to fetch menu items from a WordPress site

Non-JSON uses of the REST API

• A demonstration of a REST API feature WP Engine uses to serve up post thumbnail images based on dynamic URLs

Ryan Oeltjenbruns will follow with:

The traditional view of a web request (front end & back end)

• Quick understanding of the traditional web request workflow

• What does the back end do?

• What does the front end do?

The API approach

• Quick understanding of a more API focused web request workflow

• More generic html source + templates -- shifting some of the work to the front-end

• More Javascript heavy front ends that know how to interact with the API

How this shift directs the focus to the front end, and what this means for WordPress

• WordPress as a data store? An api? Huh?

• Themes -- what will happen to them? Will they go away? Not necessarily... but they CAN! How?

• Plugins -- where might these begin to focus and why. Focusing more on augmenting and correlating data than image sliders.

After the mid-morning break we will have a round-table discussion lead by the presenters to talk about the how the REST API will affect how we work and WordPress market place, with a follow-up Q&A.

The afternoon session of the WP Austin REST Day is where our members have the opportunity to exercise some of their new knowledge. We will break out into teams of 3-5 people to build their own desired tool using the REST API in some way. Our WPATX team members will have the guidance of floater "REST API experts" if they need them to help with implementation.

If a team chooses to start a project that will require more time to complete, we can have an async followup where teams can keep working together and share their results at the Advance WordPress Developer's Meetup in August.

Possible projects for the WPATX REST API Team build:

• REST API feed for wpaustin.com (http://wpaustin.com/) pulling updates into a widget that people can install on their own site

• Collaborative blogging platform where the WP Austin community can cross-blog each other easily. (If I have a blog and you have a blog, create an easy, automated means to share posts between our blogs)

• Feed of WordCamps and other conferences that members would be interested in (this may get more into RSS aggregation instead of the REST API?)

• OR any Mad Science REST API project you have been thinking about

WP Engine is contributing the full cost of the WP Austin REST Day as their way to helping the WPATX Community of Developers and Practitioners expand their knowledge base and skills. I know all our members join us in thanking WP Engine for 'Gifting' the WPATX Developer community with the opportunity to both learn about and be inspired by the upcoming challenges presented by the REST API.

As a WPATX member, your investment is parking, a day away from your business, and spending time with your peers in a great environment to learn something new. If you have not yet considered how the adoption of the REST API will effect your WordPress business, we encourage you to attend and learn from developers who are working with it everyday.

If you have been using the WordPress REST API and would like to present or demo your WP REST API project, please contact Sandi Batik using Meetup messaging.

One of the best comments I've read about the WordPress REST API is from a our good friend, Josh Pollack -

“Our community is hearing that the WP REST API is going to change WordPress and they haven’t seen that happen. I don’t see the WP REST API as changing WordPress. I see the WP REST API as a WordPress feature that makes it easier to interact with your site’s data.”

I hope we will see you at the 2016 WP Austin REST DAY!