Plugin vs the WordPress REST API

Looks to me like the API you found at developer.wordpress.com is for wordpress.com sites only. This plugin gets installed into a self-hosted wordpress instance (www.ads-software.com).

You can make use of the WordPress.com API via the JetPack plugin.

As to what the difference between the two is, I don’t know. The two implementations of what seems largely the same concept seems to be confusing a lot of people.

I guess this plugin is good for those that don’t want to use JetPack. And Im sure there are pros and cons to both.

This plugin was supposed to be added to the core which would be useful as you can know your app / theme etc will work with any (up to date) WP install and not just JetPack enabled ones.

But the JSON Rest API development seems to have gone very quiet or perhaps Im looking in the wrong place? ??

If someone who has a good idea of the overall architecture could reply that would be great. I’ve seen this question asked many times but only ever replied by people having a guess!

The difference is that the WordPress Rest API has to make three API calls: one from your app to the Rest API, then another to your website, and then a response to your app. The plugin runs directly on your database, meaning you only have to call to your database and then get a response. The result is improved performance by using the plugin. It’s not drastic, but for large amounts of data it’s noticeable.

This plugin is actively being updated at https://github.com/WP-API/WP-API in anticipation of going into core. Unfortunately the docs for this plugin have some errors in them and the contributors are putting their efforts to the new version and don’t seem to be monitoring this support forum.

There was a lot of talk about this plugin going into core a couple of versions ago, but now it’s all gone quiet :(. I think I’d rather use this than the Jetpack API (I don’t want my app to be dependent on a non core plugin).