A Day Of REST Boston: exclusive discount code for VIPs and agencies

Our friends at VIP Featured Partner Human Made would like to invite you to join them for A Day of REST Boston, a one-day conference about the REST API, alongside two days of in-depth workshops (March 8th and 10th).

The REST API became an integral part of WordPress with the release of version 4.7, and there are already organizations as diverse as the New York Times, the Guggenheim Museum, npm, and Wired using it in production.

Of course, it won’t always be immediately obvious when a site or app is making use of the REST API: events like this offer a rare opportunity to peer behind the scenes, to find out who is doing what, and how.

At A Day of REST, you will be able to:

  • learn from the REST API development team
  • discover how professional developers are using the API in production sites
  • learn best practices for creating custom APIs in WordPress
  • find out how to use different front-end technologies with WordPress
  • learn in workshops by professional trainers such as Wes Bos and Zac Gordon
  • meet and network with like-minded professionals who are using the API for their projects

The speaker lineup features a number of familiar names to the VIP community: Joe Hoyle and Petya Raykovska from Human Made, John Eckman and Adam Silverstein from 10up, plus Automattic’s Mel Choyce and Kelly Dwan.

We have a discount code for VIP clients that gives you 20% off conference tickets – VIPLovesWPAPI. You can learn more about A Day of REST and grab tickets at adayofrest.hm.

If you’d like to send a team of your developers you can contact Human Made directly about creating a group booking for the conference and workshops.

It’s an exciting time, and we’re looking forward to what the future holds as WordPress moves deeper into the application-driven, connected world. We hope you’ll take advantage of this great opportunity for your developers to build the skills they need to take advantage of this powerful new feature.

AMP plugin update: action required

It’s a year since AMP was first introduced: and VIP clients are among the many leading publishers who have embraced the new format. Some have built their own bespoke output templates; but most are using the template which ships with the plugin, either as-is or with modest enhancements.

To mark the anniversary, and reflect the growing visibility of AMP online, we’ve extended the WordPress.com platform’s support for the format. Users now have control over the colors of their AMP output from the AMP Customizer, which can also be extended to support other options. We’ve also added compatibility with some of the newer features added to the AMP spec.

These enhancements required us to make some potentially breaking markup changes.

To protect our clients from unintended consequences, VIP sites hosted on WordPress.com have been set to continue publishing AMP using the original output template.

We will switch all VIPs over to the new template at 1000 Eastern (1400 UTC) on October 25, giving you two weeks to test your customizations, and update if necessary. If you can’t meet this deadline, you can continue to use the old template using this helper function:

if ( function_exists( 'amp_backcompat_use_v03_templates' ) ) {
    amp_backcompat_use_v03_templates();
}

The old template will remain available within the plugin until the end of the year. If you still prefer to continue using it, you should copy it into your theme and load it using a variant of the backcompat function mentioned earlier.

The open source AMP plugin is also being updated with the new features, including the same changes to the markup of the default template. Clients on VIP Go should test any customizations locally before updating live sites. The same helper function can be used to call the original template if required.

Thanks to our partners at 10up and Alley Interactive for their contributions to the development of the plugin since its launch.

Update (2016-10-26): All VIPs using the default template or without the back-compat function have now been switched over to the new template. If you encounter any issues or need anyone help upgrading, please get in touch.

Keeping up to speed with the AMP project

It will soon be six months since the unveiling of the Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative, better known as AMP. The project has kept up the pace of development since then, and it’s well worth reviewing some of the new possibilities of the AMP format.

AMP is an open source initiative to improve the web experience on mobile devices. It’s an extension of HTML, powered by JavaScript, and supported by Google’s CDN. But unlike similar initiatives from other tech giants, AMP gives you full control of how your content is presented. AMP pages still look like your pages, just faster, and much more efficient.

AMP options are generally only shown when you browse with a mobile device. AMP first became visible for news results on Google mobile search queries: you’ll typically see a carousel of items from leading publishers near the top of the page. But if you’re browsing on a desktop, even if you try to hit specific test URLs, you won’t see any hint of it.

Google is steadily adding AMP capability to other services. It is now also used on Google News in a number of countries. And if you publish through Google Play Newsstand, it’s now possible to set AMP to be the default rendering (when available).

We’re also seeing growing interest beyond Google: Twitter Moments on iOS and Android now link to AMP versions, with hints of further integration to follow. Millions of eBay browse nodes are available in AMP. Socially-fuelled news app Nuzzel shows AMP content when available, and there are examples of publishers building their own mobile apps around the AMP format, such as this German news site.

We also understand that Google is planning to integrate AMP more deeply into mobile search results in the very near future. Where an AMP version is available, Google will link mobile users directly to it, rather than the conventional web page.

WordPress.com VIP has been AMP-ready since day one: indeed, we were the only tech company in the select group of launch partners. Our free AMP plugin is available to all VIPs; and is delivering many millions of AMP page views each week.

The plugin comes bundled with a generic output template, which will be immediately familiar to users of the WordPress.com Reader or mobile app. But we strongly advise VIPs to swap in their own template: instructions for doing so are included in the plugin’s readme file. (You’ll find the latest version on GitHub.)

Full details of the AMP specification are published on the project website, which now also includes a handy web-based validation tool. There’s also a useful validator extension for Chrome and Opera, which shows when an AMP version of the current page is available, and indicates whether or not it passes validation.

It’s worth following the development of the AMP framework if you aren’t already doing so: the project is under active development, and there have been significant improvements to the handling of things like ads and analytics in recent weeks. You’ll find them at amphtml on Twitter; and they post regularly on their WordPress.com-hosted blog, where you’ll also find a regularly updated roadmap.