A few hours ago, Ryan McCue, one of the lead developers of the WordPress REST API project who recently received guest commit access for WordPress 4.4, committed a patch that adds the REST API infrastructure to WordPress core.

In his commit message, McCue referred to the infrastructure as a baby API:

REST API: Introduce baby API to the world. Baby API was born at 2.8KLOC on October 8th at 2:30 UTC. API has lots

of growing to do, so wish it the best of luck. Thanks to everyone who helped along the way: Props rmccue, rachelbaker, danielbachhuber, joehoyle, drewapicture, adamsilverstein, netweb, tlovett1, shelob9, kadamwhite, pento, westonruter, nikv, tobych, redsweater, alecuf, pollyplummer, hurtige, bpetty, oso96_2000, ericlewis, wonderboymusic, joshkadis, mordauk, jdgrimes, johnbillion, jeremyfelt, thiago-negri, jdolan, pkevan, iseulde, thenbrent, maxcutler, kwight, markoheijnen, phh, natewr, jjeaton, shprink, mattheu, quasel, jmusal, codebykat, hubdotcom, tapsboy, QWp6t, pushred, jaredcobb, justinsainton, japh, matrixik, jorbin, frozzare, codfish, michael-arestad, kellbot, ironpaperweight, simonlampen, alisspers, eliorivero, davidbhayes, JohnDittmar, dimadin, traversal, cmmarslender, Toddses, kokarn, welcher, and ericpedia.

If you’re not familiar with the REST API and its potential impacts on WordPress’ future, I highly recommend reading the following articles.

In the lifespan of an open source project, there are milestone moments. Even though only half of the REST API is in WordPress 4.4, I consider this to be one of those moments.

If all goes well, developers will have access to the complete REST API in WordPress 4.5. I hope you’ll join me in congratulating all of the contributors that have and continue to work on the REST API.