WordPress Plugin Development: Talking to APIs | Hacker News Reader

WordPress Plugin Development: Talking to APIs

curry-software.com

49 pointsjdemler20 comments

This is a really useful and informative writeup.

However, to me it just highlights a lot of things that Wordpress/PHP is bad at. For one, no mention of testing here (or really hardly anywhere in PHP-land), although keeping the API logic in a separate class is a good idea.

Also, the flexibility/ease of use tradeoff going from wp_remote_get and friends is terrible. It's so frustrating that PHP doesn't have a better general networking solution than "idk, just fork to curl". The Guzzle library helps a lot here, but I don't see a lot of the PHP/WP community embracing it much.

With the current plethora of widely-supported Web development frameworks, I really don't see any reason to use PHP or Wordpress for new projects.

I think the reasons to still use WordPress and PHP at this point are really a mix of a few things:

1. It's very easy to install for an inexperienced person, which is a pro shared by every PHP script you can imagine. If you're making a product meant to be run on shared hosting servers or aimed at a non technical audience, you do not want to have to say 'here's how to use the command line and here's how to set up SSH keys'.

2. So many other sites use it (especially news/blog sites) that using it makes things easier for new writers or other non technical people you want to contribute content to the service.

3. If you're part of a very small agency, aren't particularly interested in the programming side or want to get something done that can be done with a few plugins and a free theme and don't want to reinvent the wheel, it can work fine there too.

Yes, it's probably not recommended for those with significant software engineering/web development expertise, and there are certainly pain points for those in those situations, but I think the key thing to remember is that its ideal audience is a much less technical one with limited hosting options and a need for easy installation over code quality.

I wanted to add a number 4 to your list and that is the user experience to the client. I work in a digital agency and our main focus is on WordPress (after coming from the start-up world, this is sometimes painful for me). But, the ubiquity of WordPress and how consistent the software has been over the years, it is a no-brainer decision for clients.

Plus, with the ability to create your own REST endpoints and pipe that into js, it's been pretty nice to work with. We've built some great data vizs with WP, Vue, SVGs...

You're right, of course. I suppose I'm just frustrated that there isn't a similar widely-used solution available for non-technical folks that also doesn't feel painful for Web devs to extend.

I have a lot of reservations about Wordpress's hook-based architecture, and I get frustrated with old design decisions like the parameter order for `array_map` and `array_filter`, etc. etc. Sometimes you just need to vent.

Anyway, thanks for the perspective :)

With the posix extension, PHP does not have the capability to fork a process. And even if user is using curl, curl does not get forked. Do you know what the fork system call does? Do you think when you use curl, a process becomes forked?

‍️ well yeah, I guess my understanding was wrong, heh. Thanks for the pointer.

I know my parent comment was pretty antagonistic, maybe we can both do better on that front in the future.

>With the current plethora of widely-supported Web development frameworks, I really don't see any reason to use PHP or Wordpress for new projects.

Agreed. The thought of using raw cURL in PHP to write an API service layer makes me shudder.

The people who use the websites, really like wordpress. Nothing else is simpler and also does the job 99% of the time.

It definitely gets the job done. But as soon as the job's done and you want anything else, it becomes a complete nightmare.

Guzzle isn’t really embraced in the WP ecosystem for one main reason: WP has its own HTTP layer. It’s atypical for developers to switch out to using cURL, since the gains you get are fairly minimal, and you lose the benefits of the WP HTTP client. (Keep-alive connections aren’t particularly useful to most people.)

WordPress doesn’t use Guzzle because it requires PHP 5.2 compatibility. It does use an open source, third-party(-ish) library called Requests under the hood: http://requests.ryanmccue.info

(I maintain Requests, and am also a committer to WordPress.)

What are the alternatives to Wordpress? Every time a small business comes to me and wants a website, my answer is Wordpress + a theme + one or two plugins. I'm not aware of anything else with as many themes or plugins available, or as easy to get going.

I'm a C++ dev, not a professional web developer, but I help out friends and family. With Wordpress I usually bill around 4 hours to do a website for someone if they have the content written.

I was a professional web developer and occasionally moonlight as one. If you have non-savvy people entering content, WordPress is, in most cases, the only sensible choice.

I can turn a better site around that suits most peoples' needs in Jekyll these days in less time. I took the best of both worlds here and developed a workflow of: 1) private WordPress for content editing categorized content in Kramdown using only the ACF Pro and s3 uploader plugins 2) a process that builds and deploys a jekyll site to an HAproxy load-balanced NGINX cluster whenever anyone clicks Publish.

It pulls the content directly from the wordpress database at build time and the site uses webpack and whatever javascript niceties you'd expect from a site developed in 2018.

> For one, no mention of testing here (or really hardly anywhere in PHP-land), [...]

In a different life I had to maintain a website based on the Drupal CMS and also one based on the then-popular Laravel PHP framework, and in both environments testing was common and well-supported. As much as I dislike PHP, such a blanket statement does not hold up.

Yeah, I think you'll see PHPUnit in Symfony projects pretty typically as well. Also Guzzle.

Behat is easily one of my favorite test frameworks and PHP, at least since 5.6, is somewhat of a sensible language now.

If you have to build the kind of site that needs to do the things that WordPress does, it's a great choice.

PHP, unfortunately, is never going to get away from the reputation that it earned and some of the choices it's stuck with, but it's a perfectly adequate language to develop web software with and the tooling these days is pretty good.

It's not my choice to use, but I'm happy to use it in a modern context.

Laravel’s popularity seems to be at an all-time high, whereas Rails seems to have declined. But I may not have a full picture, and there could be regional differences.

In your experience, what are better web server languages and frameworks?

It seems to me like you're describing deficiencies in WordPress more than PHP itself.

The combination of syntax highlighting support literally everywhere and a borderline typeless system and command completion. Those are developer positives. Here is the deal php is crazy easy to set up(& make basic themes) and lots of clients will pay for php for similar reasons. Php shared hosting is cheap and franlky unless someone creates something similar it will continue to power the estimated 80+% of the web that it does today. WP is also a killer reason. Any sane client wants a site that isn't stuck on node.js/plugin version 2.X only.

Having used just about every major framework under the sun and done some WordPress work professionally, repeatedly I find that the best tools for this all wrap curl. This pattern is not as atypical as someone else suggested here. We did this repeatedly in our WordPress development.

curl has the best (in general) performance and is the most robust, reliable, battle-tested connection library there is, full stop. And it's not just limited to HTTP.

Do I really want to take a gamble with my software stack against the millions of man hours that curl has been put through? I never understood the attitude people have against curl. Problems found are fixed quickly and way quicker than in anything else.

The only place where I have found this to not be true is in the Python community, for reasons I haven't quite understood yet.

curl handles high volume, is portable, is thread safe, has features no other competitor is approaching, supports IPv6, has a stable & mature API, is well documented. What more could you want from dependable software?

With the upcoming gutenberg editor release there will be a lot of changes to the way plugins are written. Expect to see a lot of server side code to be moved to client side (where possible) with react.

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