WP REST API Team Aims for WordPress 4.7 for Merge Proposal

The WP REST API team released version 2.0 beta 13 of the feature plugin today. This release includes a couple of breaking changes, JavaScript client updates, and many other fixes and improvements.

Developers who use the plugin in their projects can expect it to follow a more stable release cycle in the future, as beta 13 marks the last of the breaking changes. According to project lead Ryan McCue, the team plans to add new features to minor releases in the 2.x series and bugfix releases in the 2.0.x series.

“Along these lines, we’re going to release a 2.0 final version in the coming months,” McCue said. “This will be a completely stable release with guaranteed backwards compatibility for the foreseeable future. This backwards compatibility ensures that your sites can remain up-to-date with minimal maintenance or issues with upgrading.”

The beta release post also included an updated roadmap for the project. The team is not planning to put forward part two of their merge proposal, which would add the core endpoints, for WordPress 4.6. They will be holding off until WordPress 4.7 in hopes of gaining more users with the stable 2.0 release.

We believe endpoints for the main WordPress objects (posts, users, comments, terms, and taxonomies) are not enough to garner the support needed for the proposal to be accepted. Our hope is that with a stable version 2.0 release, we will attract our community members that have been waiting for the endpoints to be available in core, and submit a merge proposal for the WordPress 4.7 release cycle.

Although the greater WordPress development community is excited about the potential of the REST API, the contributor base remains relatively small and spread thin for the task of keeping pace with core. McCue, speaking on behalf of the team, said they are looking to get more help from WordPress core component maintainers as well as outside developers.

“Moving forward, the API team sees our role as advisory over the API itself, with the API treated as an integral part of the component rather than maintained by a separate team,” McCue said. “We’re also going to continue to work on our feature plugins (metadata, site/multisite, menus/widgets, and authentication) in parallel, and are looking for help on these as well.”

With the plugin approaching its 2.0 final version on a more stable path, it is a good time for new developers to get involved. The WP REST API team plans to allocate more time for mentoring and helping developers use the API. If you want to get involved, jump in on the comments of the release post or join the team in the #core-restapi Slack channel.