 Thank you. Whoa, that's a big light These empty seats are worrying me a little bit, but then I have a balcony which is super cool. I've not had that before Hi, everyone. So In the last two years, you've probably heard about the rest API you I mean unless you've been living under a rock And all the amazing opportunity it provides for WordPress projects and how it is the future of WordPress and all that jazz You know and the rest API was a much needed bread of fresh air for our favorite CMS That is looking a little bit like this right now trying to kind of handle all sorts of different tasks You know and failing unfortunately quite a bit of them like performance security scale, you know so Let's look at WordPress as if it was a living breeding event organizer I do a little bit of event organizing myself. So kind of help me relate Right now it invites like thousands of people to party thousands let's say millions right and It expects to do everything itself, right? Expects to create thousands of pieces of content and also deliver them immediately, you know Catering is something that it cares deeply about, but also it has to run there run everything on the back end, you know like food livery drinks lights furniture support on the back end and cleaning as well all the while ensuring that they're not unwanted guests at the party and looking fabulous You know being super trendy Being very very modern and being everyone's personal guide, you know, it has to kind of show all the guests around And even though it has phd these days some people are still expecting it to behave as if it was in kindergarten You know and it kind of has to be nice to them as well so If I was that event organizer, I would be on the verge of a breakdown kind of burnt out and in a serious need of some help so How should we make WordPress feel less exhausted all the time Rest API to the rescue The rest API will help WordPress learn to delegate, you know and kind of Concentrate on what it does best provide a very very amazing Backend for authors and writers to create content all the while giving other new stars a chance to kind of present that content and You know, those are all the cool kids developers like to play with But as any growth process introducing the rest API to WordPress projects comes with some challenges and Most of them are not necessarily related to code like the fact that with a rest API project you might lose some of the WordPress core functionality and There's special effort that has to be made for those Kind of pieces of functionality to be brought back to a project Basically like the appearance settings because the rest a with a rest API you kind of decoupled the front end from the back end So all the appearance settings might disappear Everything that people are used to using, you know setting up menus kind of editing links previewing posts and as you can imagine this can be a problem for a lot of people because a Lot of people use WordPress Not just by coding, you know, the good thing about WordPress is that it comes with certain expectations from a lot of people The chances of your clients or pms expecting WordPress to behave in a specific way are about a hundred percent, you know the chances of then being able to edit menus or Customize the theme with a little bit of CSS or change the team as they want to or preview or do all all sorts of things like that and It may be a lot of them have already done that and they will expect to be able to do it with a project you're building for them and Here comes a story This is me and my friend and colleague Siobhan and We're WordPress contributors, but also event organizers among other conferences that we have organized We recently through a conference called a day of rest which is solely dedicated to the WordPress REST API We've already done twice two of those actually one in London and one in Boston in 2016 and 2017 and A little backstory about us Siobhan is a writer if you don't know who she is she Literally wrote the book on WordPress if you haven't read it to do it because it's really fascinating But Siobhan is probably the author that knows more about WordPress core functionality and history than any other author alive as for me I came to IT from marketing in 2011 after five years of like working in a Digital department telling developers what to do and having zero idea of how they're gonna do it Like I was one of those PMs that came from marketing that didn't know what they were talking about Which is like I want this to look that way and that to attack that way, you know, basically all the things you hate But still, you know in 2011 I discovered WordPress and all of a sudden my life changed because I didn't need a developer to create a website anymore And it was so awesome You know, I didn't need anyone to be able to kind of put aside together in like a day and a half It was really really good But it changed Because this happened. I realized the irony of The story about how we built the first website for a day of rest But it is it illustrates perfectly what happens when you as developers don't communicate What's going to change when you use the rest API on a WordPress project? And here's what happened Me and Siobhan our site builders we do a little bit more than just create content with WordPress We know how to tweak teams. We know a little bit of PHP. We know we know a little bit of CSS So when we had to build the first Website for a day of rest because everyone at human made us so so busy There were no developers available and we were like, okay, we want to announce this event So we are going to build this website on our own using a theme using some plugins tweaking a little bit the design You know just implementing the colors. We had a good designer that kind of recommended a couple of things to us And yeah in two days. We had a site, but it wasn't great for several several reasons the first of which was that we were throwing a conference about using the rest API and our own website wasn't using the rest API and Twitter kind of had comments about that, you know developers like to kind of mock And it was enough for our own developers to be like a alright We'll rebuild it and for me that meant that okay if our developers thought that Twitter had arguments enough to rebuild this website Awesome for me that meant I could go back to market my event, you know the website will we rebuild Twitter? We shut up and I will be happily, you know kind of I will happily go back to What I had to do to kind of throw a good event So Joe who is on that slide behind who is our CTO our Cleverest developer and also is one of the core contributors to the rest API project He rebuilt the site built a rest API team react and And launched the site in like two and a half days using the content that we already had on the previous website and When he did that he The site looked probably like the same, you know, and it had Awesome little kind of widget at the bottom showing developers the rest API requests that were made at that moment and everything was everything seemed really really good and The team was open sourced, you know as it's supposed to be and Joe wrote a post Saying this is how we did it. This is why we did it. Oh and by the way, this is what is missing from, you know This functionality compared to, you know, a website that you just built solely on WordPress and this is how Siobhan and I who were kind of supposed to be managing the content found out that overnight We couldn't edit menus anymore We couldn't add links to pages that weren't using the module or page builder Couldn't add sponsors to the website. We had to wait days for somebody to make a change, you know And each small change required a developer with enough JavaScript for a state API knowledge I don't know if I have to mention my reaction I mean, I didn't really have many words because like we're remote companies that we primarily use Slack So this is what my reactions in those days and like discovering all these things were You know for years when it came to WordPress, I've been able to figure something out, you know tweak here and there Until this this time my hands were tight and for the first time since 2007 I was back to the story miserable state of meeting a developer to make a change on a website Siobhan is an accomplished author. She was a little bit more eloquent and in In the company in a WordPress company that consisted of 90 percent developers at that point We we had become kind of the involuntarily Victims of the miscommunication about what would happen when we launched this cool new feature So going back to that particular challenge Just a sound advice If you're developing and working on a rest API project make sure Your clients and your non-developers are aware what you're proposing to do with the functionality And even if your clients are asking for the rest API on a project Make sure that they realize what they will be losing from the WordPress core functionality if you build them Full if you build on the side that the way they want it and don't rebuild those features Additionally because that's also budget So Don't let them believe that just because it's WordPress. It's going to have everything that comes out of the box right now Otherwise You know, make sure your PMS know that as well. Otherwise, they will end up trolling you on stage for You know ages like I do for the fourth time with Joe. I believe telling this story so Think about some of the things that you take for granted on a project Because let's face it, you know, the developers working with the rest API a lot of them might be in this room today You guys you're you're the rock stars of WordPress coding developing rock stars, you know using the modern technologies and all that but And you don't you might not even remember what the dopey admin looks like because you know, it's command line or a bust You know, you don't even go to the admin Nope, why why would you? but Well comes down to this Be kind to the people you work with and Don't teach them to swim by throwing them in the ocean Help them understand what you guys are building together because you are building it together You can start by Giving clients and pms this to read This is a very comprehensive guide to the rest API that Siobhan wrote with Ryan and Joe a couple of other people from the rest API team And it's a very good start Thank you