Them and us: Using the WordPress REST API to display both public and private content

Date: Friday, July 14, 2017
Time: 10:30 - 11:15 am (EDT) (UTC-04:00)
Location: Room 1053
Format: General Lecture Session

Session description

In higher education, we work with a lot of sensitive information. Even data that's not federally protected might need to be kept private only to members of a specific faculty group, research center or set of course coordinators. The built-in content security within WordPress—limited to sharing passwords or creating user accounts for the site—is both cumbersome and doesn't always provide as much security as clients seek. But, with the release of the WordPress REST API, we have another option.

The same installation of a WordPress site can be used by content managers to prepare—and present—public and private information while non-WordPress authentication measures can be used to limit access to the latter, perhaps even from another domain! Furthermore, private content can share the same space with other web applications which may not rely on WordPress as a development framework. This provides us the maximum flexibility to help clients coordinate within their organizations, and it helps keep us out of the business of either manually updating private information on members-only sites or having to maintain multiple WordPress sites separately from each other.

Presenter

David Dashifen Kees

Headshot of David Dashifen Kees
Senior Web Application Developer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

By day, David Dashifen Kees is a mild-mannered programmer living in Alexandria, VA working remotely for the Engineering IT Shared Services unit within the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. By night... he's pretty much the same thing. Programming since the sixth grade, Dash has been writing web applications in academia since 1998 and evangelizing WordPress at Illinois since 2010. As the primary WordPress developer for the College of Engineering and a member of the University's "Publish @ Illinois" team running the campus-wide WordPress Network, he's been a driving force behind WordPress adoption within the college and on campus. He programs with tabs, uses two spaces after a period, and you can pry the Oxford comma from his cold, dead hands.

Sessions

  • General Lecture Session: Them and us: Using the WordPress REST API to display both public and private content

Session video

Sessions were recorded and have been uploaded. View the schedule or visit our main videos page to view the videos.

Sponsors

President Sponsor

Vice-President Sponsor

Graduate Sponsors

Undergraduate Sponsors