In case you missed it, version 0.8 is out, albeit a little late. I also didn’t get around to posting the meeting notes from last week, so here’s a quick roundup:

One Consumer Per User vs Independent Consumers / Consumer Registration
We’re going to go with independent consumers, because we kind of have to. The conversation turned to how we register new consumers, and a number of interesting ideas were floated: creating a central repository on WP.org where consumers like mobile apps can register, for example. We’re going to circle back around to both this and scoped tokens after we get the initial OAuth stuff settled.

Multisite
In order to load the correct plugins, we’re probably going to have to go with per-domain API endpoints (e.g. wpapiteam.wordpress.com/wp-json.php). nacin pointed out that we could hack around to avoid this in ms-settings.php, but it’s a bad idea. Whatever we use here is going to be a compromise, and this seems like the best one. Also worth mentioning that we have a multisite-specific plugin that needs some serious love.

This Week
I’d like to push out two releases this week so that we hit 1.0 before Christmas. The plan currently is 0.9 on Tuesday (post-meeting) and 1.0 on Saturday. We’ve got a few issues that still need pull requests before 0.9. Importantly, I really want to get tests happening this week, either in 0.9 or 1.0, as we really need them. We’ve already been bitten by a compatibility issue.

We also need to land authentication this week. The initial version that I’m working on has no UI at all, but follows the independent consumer model as discussed. The UI we can work on later, after we ensure that the authentication works properly.

I’ve put up an anonymous feedback form on Google Docs. If you have anything to say about the project, the team, project management or anything else, please use it. Feel free to suggest new features there as well. This is a resource for everyone to use, no matter how involved you are with the project.

Regardless of whether you’ve been involved with WordPress for a long time or you’re a newcomer, regardless of how proficient you think you are, you have something to contribute to the project. There’s nothing worse from my perspective than seeing people discuss issues on other forums that I didn’t even know existed, then hearing that they didn’t think their feedback would be taken seriously or they didn’t think it was worth submitting. There’s nothing I’d love more than to wake up tomorrow with tonnes of new emails in my inbox.

If you’re reading this post, please, go and submit a piece of feedback, even if you think you have nothing to say. Anything from a single sentence all the way up to an essay is welcome.

(For those that are interested, Google Docs stores the results in a spreadsheet. The only data gathered apart from what you supply is a timestamp of when you submitted the form.)

Just realised I forgot to post this earlier, so apologies for the late notice. Just confirming, this week’s meeting is coming up in about 7 hours: Monday 2nd at 21:00 UTC (same time as always). There’s a few things I’d like to touch on, including:

• Response objects
• Scoping out the user endpoints
• Unit testing
• General triage and detailed scoping
• Any other 0.8-related items we want to discuss

Further agenda items welcomed 🙂

Also, if you missed it, 0.7 is out albeit slightly late (sorry!). Thanks to everyone who contributed to it!

Thanks to everyone who made it to the meeting today. Here’s what we discussed.

Authentication
We’re aiming for OAuth 1.0a in core by version 1.0. Max Rice has an implementation in WooCommerce’s new API (based on WP API) that is pretty lightweight, so I’m happy to include something like that in core.

I’d like to aim for OAuth integration in 0.8 (next week’s release), and smooth it out as needed in 0.9 and 1.0.

OAuth might make development use harder, so basic authentication will likely stay around, but probably moved into a separate plugin for development use. For Javascript applications, an OAuth access token will be pre-issued via wp-api.js, and we’ll have to bake signing into that too. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem, fingers crossed.

Having API clients opens us up to cool things like client scope, however we’re going to look at this after 1.0 once the core part of this is complete. We also have to consider the WordPress apps for various platforms, so we may need to look at more things here.

Global State
At the moment, the various sub-parts of WP API (e.g. WP_API_Posts) rely on a bunch of global state via actions/filters. This could make it a pain for plugins to use the WP_JSON_Server class without modifying it. We talked about this, and it’s probably not as big of an issue as I expected, but I’ll get up a pull request about this soon.

Request/Response Objects
At the moment, all request parts are passed in via function parameters (yay!) but not all values are returned from the function (boo!); that is, our methods cause side-effects. Headers for example are sent via the server object, which makes it difficult to embed responses from endpoints into others without accidentally sending headers as well.

This is something that needs core team discussion as well, but the feeling here is that we want to push towards this, based on usage patterns both in this project and in others. I’ll begin talking about this with the core team to gauge their feelings on it, and we’ll see what everyone thinks of it.