Explore the REST API

I have had the pleasure of working with the WordPress.com REST API over the past few weeks and am very excited to start “dogfooding” this resource everywhere I can.

One cool feature is that all the endpoints are self-documenting. In fact, the documentation for the REST API is built by the API itself! With this information we were able to build a console to help debug and explore the various resources that are now available through the new API. So let me introduce you to the new REST console for WordPress.com.

A word of caution: the console is only available when you are logged into WordPress.com and is hooked up to the live system, so be careful with your POST requests!

At its simplest you can supply the method, path, query, and body for the resource you wish to examine (it’s pre-populated with /me). Press “Submit” to see the response status for your request and an expandable JSON object that you can explore. All links listed under meta are active, so click one to make another request.

To get a better idea of what kind of parameters a request can take, select it under the “Reference” section. It will then provide an interface with some contextual help to let you know which path, query, and body parameters it accepts, what each of those parameters are for, and a field for you to provide the value.

Related articles

• Explore the REST API (developer.wordpress.com)
• How to analyze your Blog Traffic using WordPress Stats API (selvabalaji.wordpress.com)
• Apigee v2 Console: Making learning APIs as simple as possible, but not simpler (apigee.com)
• Phasing out old API, upgrade your WordPress plugins! (flattr.net)
• REST easy with JIRA 5 (blogs.atlassian.com)