2015 WordCamp Maine Keynote

WP Rest API, The New
York Times, and The New
WordPress
WordCamp Maine
Portland, Maine - May 16, 2015

Scott Taylor
• Core Developer, WordPress
open source project
• Release Lead for 4.4
• Sr. Software Engineer, The
New York Times
• @wonderboymusic on Twitter/
Instagram/Swarm
• I like Music, NYC, and
Mexican food

Blogs at The NYTimes
• Multisite
• 200+ blogs over the course
of time
• The 00s were the glory days
for Blogs and WordPress
• The NYT used WordPress
very early
• NYT was an early investor in
Automattic

Legacy Blogs Codebase
• Separate from the rest of the codebase (NYT4 is
PHP, but not WordPress)
• Global NYTimes CSS and JS, CSS for all Blogs,
custom CSS per-blog
• A universe that assumed jQuery AND Prototype
were loaded on the page in global scope

<html>
<head>
<script src=“prototype.js”</script>
<script src=“jquery.js”</script>
</head>
<script>
jQuery(‘#good-times’).click(…)
$$(‘.prototype’).whatever()
</script>
Somewhere else in the markup:

What could possibly go
wrong here?

• Inline HTML from 2008 that assumes Prototype will
still be a thing in 2015, stored in post_content
• Widgets and inline code that add their own version
of jQuery/Prototype, because YOLO
• Even better: widgets/modules from other teams that
use a different version of jQuery … at times there
could be 4 jQuerys on the page (and 4 different
versions at that)
Things Like ….

No shared modules
• Code/HTML markup can get out of sync with other
projects regularly: header, footer, navigation
• The CSS and JS ﬁles split across multiple SVN
repos - changes to global assets can affect us
without us knowing. Fixing the code requires
scouring through multiple repos.

At the NYT, we don’t use …
• WordPress Comments: There is an entire team that deals with
these for the site globally, in a different system called CRNR
• Media: There is another CMS at the Times, Scoop, which
stores the images, videos, slideshows, etc
• WordPress native post-locking: This only landed in
WordPress core in version 3.6, we have yet to reconcile the
differences
• There is layer for Bylines which is separate from Users:
Our users are employees authenticated via LDAP, most post
authors don’t actually enter the content themselves

2008: Live Blogs at the Times
• A Blog would create a post and check “Start Live
Blogging”
• the updates related to the post were stored in custom
tables in the database
• the APIs for interacting with these tables duplicated tons
of WordPress functionality
• Custom Post Types didn’t exist until WordPress 3.0 (June
2010) - the NYT code was never rewritten to leverage
them (would have required porting the content as well)

Live (actual) Blogs:
Dashboards/Dashblogs
• A Live Blog would be its own blog in the network, its own
set of tables
• A special dashboard theme that had hooks to add
custom JS/CSS for each individual blog, without baking
them into the theme
• Making an entirely new site in the network for a 4-hour
event is overkill
• For every 10 or so new blogs that are added, you are
adding 100 new database tables - gross!

2013: The New Frontier
My arrival at the New York Times coincided with
the NYT5 project, already in progress

NYT5
• NYT5 “apps” are Git repos that are transformed via
Grunt into a new directory structure. You can’t run
your repo as a website: it has to be built
• Impossible to create a “theme” this time with
shared JS and CSS - CSS is SASS, JS is Require.
• PHP for shared components has Composer
dependencies and uses namespaces - the
directories are expanded via Grunt in accordance
with PSR-0 Autoloading Standard

require( [‘jquery’], function ($) {
$(‘#cool-link’).click(...);
} );
require( [‘jquery/1.9’], function ($) {
} );
require( [‘jquery/2.0’], function ($) {
} );
Require.js

NYT5 Dealbreakers
• We can’t just point at WordPress on every request and
have our code ﬁgure out routing. Routing happens in
Apache in NYT5 - most requests get piped to app.php
• Because PHP Namespaces are used, WP has to load
early and outside of them (global scope)
• On the frontend, WP cannot exit prematurely before
hitting the framework, which returns the response to the
server via  
SymfonyHttpFoundation

$wp_query = new WP_Query();
$GLOBALS[‘wp_query’] = ...
 
function wp_thing() {
global $wp_query;
. . .
}
GLOBALS

Namespaces
namespace ScottCodeFun;
class Cool {
}
function cooler() {}
In another ﬁle:
use ScottCodeFun as Fun;
new FunCool();
Funcooler();

Apache NYT5: app.php
Route to NYT5 Blogs app
- Load initial ﬁles 
- Bootstrap WP
- Capture WP content
- WP complete

NYT5 Advantages
• “shared” modules - we inherit the “shell” of the page,
which includes: navigation, footer, login, etc.
• our nyt5 theme doesn’t need to produce an entire
HTML document, just the “content” portion
• With WP in global scope, all of its code is available even
when we hit the MVC parts of the NYT5 framework.
• WP output is captured via an output buffer on load - it’s
accessible downstream when the app logic is running.

• We can use Varnish instead of Batcache
• our [nytmedia] shortcodes can just output
“markers”
• The NYT5 logic for articles already knows to
replace markers with markup from shared modules
• we can lean on code from the NYT5 foundation
and shared repos

Cool, we made it
work, but …

Bad News for Blogs
• Blogs were duplicating Section Fronts, Columns: 
 
Mark Bittman has column in the paper. 
The column also exists on the web as an article.  
He contributes to the Diner’s Journal blog.  
There is a section front for dining.  
He also has his own NYTimes blog. Why?
• Blogs and WordPress were combined in everyone’s
mind. So whenever WordPress was mentioned as a
solution for anything, the response was: aren’t blogs
going away? #dark

First Draft
Lens
Live Coverage

What if…
• Instead of custom tables and
dupe’d API code, new object
types: events and updates!
• To create a new “Live Blog”: create
an event, then go to a Backbone-
powered screen to add updates
• If WP isn’t desired for the front end,
it could be the backend for
anything that wants a JSON feed
for live event data
• Using custom post types, building
a Live Event UI that looks like the
NYT5 theme would be nominal

• Built an admin interface with Backbone to quickly
produce content - which in turn could be read from
JSON feeds
• When saving, the updates post into a service we
have called Invisible City
• Our ﬁrst real foray into using the REST API
• Our plan was just to be an admin to produce data
via self-service URLs
What we did

Live Events, the new Live Blogs:
Complete Rewrite of 2008 code
• nytimes.com/live/{event} and nytimes.com/live/{event}/
{update}
• Brand new admin interface: Backbone app that uses the
WP-API. Constantly updated ﬁlterable stream - Backbone
collections that re-fetch on Heartbeat tick
• Custom JSON endpoints that handle processes that need
to happen on save
• Front end served by WordPress for SEO, but data is
received by web socket from Invisible City and rendered
via React

Most plugins only handle POST
• WP-API and Backbone speak REST
• REST will send you requests via  
PUT, DELETE, POST

$hook = add_menu_page( ... );
add_action( “load-$hook”, ‘custom_load’ );
function old_custom_load() {
if ( ‘POST’ !== $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_METHOD’] ) {
return;
}
...
}
function new_custom_load() {
if ( ‘GET’ === $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_METHOD’] ) {
return;
}
...
}

HTTP is time-consuming
• It is easy to lose track of how many things are
happening on the ‘save_post’ hook
• Admin needs to be fast
• The front end is typically cached, but page generation
shouldn’t be bogged down by HTTP requests
• Anything which is time-consuming should be
ofﬂoaded to a separate “process” or request who
response you don’t need to handle

wp_remote_post( $url, wp_parse_args( array(
‘timeout’ => 0.01,
‘blocking’ => false
), $args ) );
Fire and Forget*
* Stolen from Mark Jaquith’s nginx cache invalidation technique:
wp_remote_get( $url, array(
‘timeout’ => 0.01,
‘blocking’ => false,
‘headers’ => array( ‘X-Nginx-Cache-Purge’ => ‘1’ )
) );

Custom JSON Endpoints for POST
• Use ﬁre-and-forget technique on ‘save_post’,
instead of waiting for responses inline. You can still
log/handle/re-try responses in the separate request.
• Most things that happen on ‘save_post’ only
need to know $post_id for context, the endpoint
handler can call get_post() from there

Register a route:
$routes[ '/live-events/(?P<post_id>d+)/sns' ] = array(
array(
array( $this, 'live_event_sns' ),
WP_JSON_Server::CREATABLE
),
);
$routes[ '/async-cream-invalidation' ] = array(
array(
array( $this, 'async_cream' ),
WP_JSON_Server::CREATABLE
),
);

Handle the route:
public function async_cream() {
$urls = array_map( 'stripslashes', $_POST['urls'] );
if ( $urls ) {
nyt_cream_invalidation( $urls );
}
exit();
}

Trigger the process:
NYT_Admin_JSON::async_request(
'/async-cream-invalidation',
array(
‘body’ => array(
'urls' => $urls
)
)
);

Custom JSON Endpoints for GET
• We do not hit these endpoints on the front-end
• We have a storage mount that is fronted via Varnish
and Akamai
• JSON feeds can show up on the homepage of the
NYT to dynamically render “promos” - these have
to massively scale

An “Interactive
Promo” on an
article page

2015 WordCamp Maine Keynote

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