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Drew Jaynes I think this article has has unfairly characterized the discussion that happened in the REST API chat yesterday as “facing gridlock”. In one camp you have the core REST API team who have toiled away on prepping four core object endpoints for merge, another team of core contributors and committers who feel like four core objects with some flavor like meta support would be a good jumping off point, and then Matt, who fills his project lead role quite well in shooting for the stars, asking for nothing less than complete wp-admin parity prior to merge. Early in the chat, George Stephanis cited a proverb (For Want of a Nail) that ended up being particularly poignant to yesterday’s discussion, “for want of a nail the shoe is lost”. The majority of this article is focused on Matt basically saying “for want of a complete API the API is lost,” a wholly unrealistic expectation that flies in the face of continuous iteration, a core philosophy of WordPress development. We have three releases a year (possibly more in the future), we have feature plugins, we have incremental progress, all with continuous iteration in mind. And for some reason, Matt is still of the apparent mindset that the REST API should follow the feature plugin model — a concept I think we’re beyond at this point for the REST API. As Ryan McCue so aptly pointed out, “continuing to exist as a feature plugin hurts us more than it helps”. It hurts us because it forces us to consider feature-completeness as the measure for a core merge. And yet, we’ve already partially merged the REST API infrastructure in 4.4, which sort of throws that logic out the window. As I and others from the contributor/committer camp said in the chat, there can be a middle ground. Whether that ends up looking like the four core endpoints alone, four core endpoints with some flavor, XML-RPC parity, or some measure of wp-admin parity, remains to be seen. Let us not lose the (horse) shoe for want of a nail.
Drew Jaynes
I think this article has has unfairly characterized the discussion that happened in the REST API chat yesterday as “facing gridlock”.
In one camp you have the core REST API team who have toiled away on prepping four core object endpoints for merge, another team of core contributors and committers who feel like four core objects with some flavor like meta support would be a good jumping off point, and then Matt, who fills his project lead role quite well in shooting for the stars, asking for nothing less than complete wp-admin parity prior to merge.
Early in the chat, George Stephanis cited a proverb (For Want of a Nail) that ended up being particularly poignant to yesterday’s discussion, “for want of a nail the shoe is lost”. The majority of this article is focused on Matt basically saying “for want of a complete API the API is lost,” a wholly unrealistic expectation that flies in the face of continuous iteration, a core philosophy of WordPress development.
We have three releases a year (possibly more in the future), we have feature plugins, we have incremental progress, all with continuous iteration in mind. And for some reason, Matt is still of the apparent mindset that the REST API should follow the feature plugin model — a concept I think we’re beyond at this point for the REST API. As Ryan McCue so aptly pointed out, “continuing to exist as a feature plugin hurts us more than it helps”. It hurts us because it forces us to consider feature-completeness as the measure for a core merge. And yet, we’ve already partially merged the REST API infrastructure in 4.4, which sort of throws that logic out the window.
As I and others from the contributor/committer camp said in the chat, there can be a middle ground. Whether that ends up looking like the four core endpoints alone, four core endpoints with some flavor, XML-RPC parity, or some measure of wp-admin parity, remains to be seen. Let us not lose the (horse) shoe for want of a nail.
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