Below are my summarized notes from our two Dev Chats in February.
Notes from the February 18th, 2016 Dev Chat
We discussed releasing official “beta” or “release candidate” versions of the plugin before releasing updates to the WordPress.org repository.
The WordPress Beta Tester plugin could be used as a model for creating a similar plugin for PMPro that would install beta version ZIPs from an alternative source if the beta testing plugin was activated and configured that way.
Jason also discussed managing git branches better so bug fixes can be more easily applied to sites without including other updates/enhancements that could cause issues. Guidelines for this should be written up and shared in the contribute.md on GitHub.
There was discussion of the new “Update Scripts” system that was used recently to fix old Stripe orders after upgrading PMPro.
Jason mentioned that PMPro will be surveying their mailing list soon and asked for questions others were interested in getting answers to. @squarelines mentioned that he’d like to have a better idea of which users support their site themselves vs use a developer or service. We were already planning questions related to this.
@squarelines mentioned concerns about the “support levels and responsiveness on the forums right now”. There have been a couple of family issues that kept our support staff limited for a few weeks, exacerbating things. However, the level of support was not acceptable to Jason, and he’s still working on hiring more support staff and improving turn around times and quality of support.
Notes from the February 25th, 2016 Dev Chat on the WP REST API and PMPro
Jason wanted to let folks know that we’re working on adding WP REST API support to PMPro.
More information about the WP REST API can be found on the official site here.
It was noted that WP 4.4 introduced support for adding your own API end points, but the WP REST API plugin is still needed to gain access to the end points there for managing posts and users.
The WP core team is figuring out how and when they will implement the API over time. Some believe one should be able to recreate the entire admin dashboard before officially launching the API end points. Other believe that end points can be added incrementally. Chatters in attendance seemed to favor an incremental approach, but weren’t read up on the issue.
Jason said the plan for PMPro and the WP REST API is to recreate the two methods currently available via the XML RPC API and that should probably be ready for the next release.
Development of API stuff will be done in the pmpro-rest-api plugin here and moved into PMPro core piece by piece, similar to how the core WP REST API team is doing things.
Jason mentioned that the API work is highlighting areas where we can improve our internal “APIs” and classes. For example, having a Membership Level class would make it easier to implement API endpoints for adding, editing, and deleting membership levels.
