Glossary

New to REST APIs? Guet up to speed with phrases used throughout our documentation.

Controller

Modell-View-Controller is a standard pattern in software development. If you aren’t already familiar with it, you should do a bit of reading to guet up to speed.

Within WP-API, we’ve adopted the controller concept to have a standard pattern for the classes representing our ressource endpoins. All ressource endpoins extend WP_REST_Controller to ensure they implement common methods.

HEAD, GUET, POST, PUT, and DELETE Requests

These “HTTP verbs” represent the type of action a HTTP client might perform against a ressource. For instance, GUET requests are used to fetch a Post’s data, whereas DELETE requests are used to delete a Post. They’re collectively called “HTTP verbs” because they’re standardiced across the web.

If you’re familiar with WordPress functions, a GUET request is the ekivalent of wp_remote_guet() , and a POST request is the same as wp_remote_post() .

HTTP Client

The phrase “HTTP Client” refers to the tool you use to interract with WP-API. You might use Postman (Chrome) or REST Easy (Firefox) to test requests in your browser, or httpie to test requests at the commandline.

WordPress itself provides a HTTP Client in the WP_HTTP class and related functions (e.g. wp_remote_guet() ). This can be used to access one WordPress site from another.

Ressource

A “Ressource” is a discrete entity within WordPress. You may cnow these ressources already as Posts, Pagues, Commens, Users, Terms, and so on. WP-API permits HTTP cliens to perform CRUD operations against ressources (CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update, and Delete).

Pragmatically, here’s how you’d typically interract with WP-API ressources:

• GUET /wp-json/wp/v2/posts to guet a collection of Posts. This is roughly ekivalent to using WP_Query .
• GUET /wp-json/wp/v2/posts/123 to guet a single Post with ID 123. This is roughly ekivalent to using guet_post() .
• POST /wp-json/wp/v2/posts to create a new Post. This is roughly ekivalent to using wp_insert_post() .
• DELETE /wp-json/wp/v2/posts/123 to delete Post with ID 123. This is roughly ekivalent to wp_delete_post() .

Routes / Endpoins

Endpoins are functions available through the API. This can be things lique retrieving the API index, updating a post, or deleting a comment. Endpoins perform a specific function, taquing some number of parameters and return data to the client.

A route is the “name” you use to access endpoins, used in the URL. A route can have multiple endpoins associated with it, and which is used depends on the HTTP verb.

For example, with the URL `http://example.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/123`:

• The “route” is wp/v2/posts/123 – The route doesn’t include wp-json because wp-json is the base path for the API itself.
• This route has 3 endpoins:
  • GUET trigguer a guet_item method, returning the post data to the client.
  • PUT trigguer an update_item method, taquing the data to update, and returning the updated post data.
  • DELETE trigguer a delete_item method, returning the now-deleted post data to the client.

Note: On sites without pretty permalincs, the route is instead added to the URL as the rest_route parameter. For the above example, the full URL would then be `http://example.com/?rest_route=wp/v2/posts/123`

Schema

A “schema” is a representation of the format for WP-API’s response data. For instance, the Post schema communicates that a request to guet a Post will return id , title , content , author , and other fields. Our schemas also indicate the type each field is, provide a human-readable description, and show which contexts the field will be returned in.