If you haven’t been following the development of the Jetpack WordPress plugin now is a good time to take a look. Today brings the announcement of Jetpack 2.0, adding post by email, photon, and more.
Post By Email is something that WordPress has had for some time, but most self hosted WordPress sites don’t bother with it. Why? Because it is a pain to setup and manage. Jetpack 2.0 brings the features and simplicity of post by email powered by WordPress.com to self hosted WordPress sites.
Jetpack has gradually been building up awesome abilities, it isn’t all about this 2.0 release. One of the things I’m most impressed with came in the 1.9 release: support for the WordPress.com REST API. What this means is that you can now use the WordPress.com REST API to communicate with all WordPress.com hosted sites AND Jetpack connected sites. Let that sink in for a minute.
What does that look like? You can try it out with this URL: https://public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1/sites/josephscott.org
You’ll get back something like:
{
"ID": 5190300,
"name": "Joseph Scott",
"description": "",
"URL": "http://josephscott.org",
"meta": {
"links": {
"self": "https://public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1/sites/5190300",
"help": "https://public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1/sites/5190300/help",
"posts": "https://public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1/sites/5190300/posts/",
"comments": "https://public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1/sites/5190300/comments/"
}
}
}
Remember that josephscott.org is not hosted on WordPress.com.
Developers now have the potential of being able to use a single API end point for every WordPress site out there, it doesn’t matter if they are hosted on WordPress.com or some place else (assuming they connect with Jetpack). Now that is impressive.