@frontity/wp-source
API reference of `@frontity/wp-source` package
This package is in charge of getting the data from self-hosted WordPress or WordPress.com sites, and make it available from our React components.
Table of Contents
Installation
Add the wp-source
package to your project:
Both of the starter themes (@frontity/mars-theme
& @frontity/twentytwenty-theme
) available when doing npx frontity create
already include this wp-source
package.
Settings
This package needs to be included in your frontity.settings.js
file as one of the packages that will be part of the Frontity project:
These are the settings you can configure for this package in your frontity.settings.js
file:
REST API settings
We recommend you to check the guide Setting the URL of the WordPress data source to get a more practical explanation of how to properly set the URL of the WordPress data source by using the properties of this package and taking into account the different WordPress scenarios.
The URL of your WordPress backend installation. The default value of this property is derived from state.frontity.url
.
Example:
If you are using Embedded Mode for your Frontity project, and the state.frontity.url
property is set, you do not have to also set the state.source.url
property as this will be the same as the value in the state.frontity.url
property.
state.source.api
state.source.api
The URL of your WordPress REST API endpoint.
From version 1.10 of the @frontity/wp-source
package, the property state.source.api
should never be set manually by the end-users (it will be computed from properties like state.source.url
or state.wpSource.isWpCom
).
Check the guide Setting the URL of the WordPress data source to understand the computed values of state.source.api
for every WordPress scenario.
state.wpSource.isWpCom
state.wpSource.isWpCom
Boolean value to indicate if the WordPress installation used as the source of data is a Personal or Premium WordPress.com plan.
This value will be false
by default and will be automatically computed to true
if needed in most of the cases.
This property only needs to be set manually to true
if you're using a Personal or Premium WordPress.com plan.
Check the guide Setting the URL of the WordPress data source to understand the value of this property depending on the WordPress scenario.
Example:
state.wpSource.prefix
state.wpSource.prefix
By using this property you can specify the prefix of your REST API, for example "/wp-json"
or "?rest_route=/"
. The default value is "/wp-json"
.
This option should only be set if you have changed the path to the REST API endpoint in your WordPress installation. If you have not done that or you're not sure what it means, you can safely ignore this option.
Custom paths
state.source.subdirectory
state.source.subdirectory
A name or path indicating the subdirectory of your domain where your Frontity site lives. For example, if your site is in https://mysite.com/blog, you have to use it with the value of blog
or /blog
. It also transform links of the entities that come from the REST API.
state.source.homepage
state.source.homepage
This option allows you to show a specific page when accessing the homepage of your site. For example, if you set this value to /about-us
then that page will be shown if you access /
.
You have to configure your WordPress with the same setting.
As this option overrides the /
route, you should set state.source.postsPage
as well in order to be able to access the posts archive in a different route.
Have a look at this video to learn more about this
state.source.postsPage
state.source.postsPage
This option allows you to show the posts archive when accessing a specific URL of your site, instead of the homepage. For example, if you set this value to /blog
, then the posts archive will be shown if you access /blog
instead of /
. It is useful when used in combination with state.source.homepage
.
You have to configure your WordPress with the same setting.
state.source.categoryBase
state.source.categoryBase
Change the base prefix of URLs for category pages with the indicated one.
For this option to work well, you have to put the same value in the WordPress site options.
state.source.tagBase
state.source.tagBase
Change the base prefix of URLs for tag pages with the indicated one.
For this option to work well, you have to put the same value in the WordPress site options.
state.source.postEndpoint
state.source.postEndpoint
Set the endpoint against which calls to the REST API are made when posts are requested, i.e. when fetching a single post, the post archive, date archives, categories, tags, authors, etc. This is useful when you want to use another post type as your default, for example “products”.
The default value is "posts"
.
Custom requests
state.source.params
state.source.params
Object of params that will be used in every call to the WP REST API when using actions.source.fetch
. This is useful to filter fields from the REST API, change the default per_page
value and so on. For example, if you set this value to
and then you visit a URL (or use actions.source.fetch
), the query part of the HTTP call to the REST API will be per_page=5&type[]=post&type[]=page
.
state.source.auth
state.source.auth
This option is a property which can hold authentication information. This could be a JWT token or a Basic Authentication string, or another type of authentication.
Values can be passed to state.source.auth
in a variety ways, e.g. via frontity.settings.js
or by setting it in the way that any other piece of frontity state is.
Additionally the value of state.source.auth
can be set via a query string. If a frontity_source_auth
Frontity Query Option param is present in the URL state.source.auth
will use its value. Values passed in this way will be removed from the initialLink
URL and added to state.frontity.options
.
Note that the Frontity Query Option parameters are camelCased when they are added to
state.frontity.options
, so thefrontity_source_auth
query string param will becomestate.frontity.options.sourceAuth
once added.
The value of state.source.auth
can also be set from an environmental variable. If frontity detects a FRONTITY_SOURCE_AUTH
environmental variable, it will pass its value to state.source.auth
.
Note that the value passed from the URL query string takes precedence over the value from the env variable.
Frontity loads environmental variables from .env files using the https://github.com/motdotla/dotenv/ package.
This value can be used in the auth
property of libraries.source.api.get
.
Crucially, state.source.auth
is removed in the afterSSR()
action, so if state.source.auth
is present in the state on the server its value will not be sent to the client, thus confidential credentials are not revealed client-side.
state.source.redirections
state.source.redirections
Via this wp-source
package, Frontity has support for 3xx Redirections that are stored in the WordPress database. Such redirections can be added for example via the popular Redirection plugin.
Through the property state.source.redirections
we can configure how we want to handle the redirections. This property can have one of the following values:
"no"
- Does not handle the redirections at all. This is the default."404"
- Only send the additional request to the WordPress instance if the original request has returned a 404 error."all"
- Always make an additional request to the WordPress instance to check if there exists a redirection. This means that for every singleactions.source.fetch()
there will be a parallel request to the WordPress server that is fired "just in case" theactions.source.fetch()
returns a 404. If theactions.source.fetch()
is successful, the result of fetching the redirection is discarded. Ifactions.source.fetch()
fails, Fronity waits for the response from fetching the redirection and if that is successful, uses its result.string
- A string that contains a regex pattern. The string must start with"RegExp:"
. This pattern will be matched against the current route and if matched, Frontity will make an additional request to the WordPress instance to check if there exists a redirection. Note that the shorthand character classes will have to be escaped, so for example instead of\d
, you will need to write\\d
.string[]
- An array of strings, which can contain the"404"
value as well as any number of strings starting with"RegExp:/"
which represent regular expressions. An additional request will be sent to Wordpress to check for the redirection if any of the regular expressions match the current route. If the array also contains a"404"
, an additional request will also be made if the original request has returned a 404 error.
Some example valid values are:
"no"
"all"
"404"
"RegExp:/some-post/(\\d*)"
"RegExp:/post-(\\w*)/(\\d*)"
["404", "RegExp:/some-post/", "RegExp:/another-post"]
Have a look at the guide Redirections with Frontity to learn more about this.
Custom Post Types
state.source.postTypes
state.source.postTypes
This option allows you to show the Custom Post Types you create at WordPress when accessing their URLs. It is an array of objects, each object being a different CPT. It has three arguments:
Differentiating type
and endpoint
may be confusing as they are usually the same. You can confirm you are doing it correctly going to the CPT endpoint
:
So in this case, the settings would be:
state.source.taxonomies
state.source.taxonomies
Similar to postTypes
setting, this one allows you to show the lists of posts of a Custom Taxonomies you create at WordPress when accessing their URLs. It is an array of objects, each object being a different Custom Taxonomy. It has four arguments:
Differentiating taxonomy
and endpoint
may be confusing as they usually are the same too. You can confirm you are doing it correctly by going to the Custom Taxonomy endpoint
:
Note that in this case taxonomy
and endpoint
are different. In the next example, we will fetch CPT "movies" instead of "posts", and add some params. It would be something like this:
How to use
This package will automatically retrieve data from the related WordPress routes when accesing a React route.
The @frontity/wp-source
package requires pretty permalinks to be enabled on the WordPress admin. For more info check the guide WordPress requirements for Frontity.
The data got from WordPress REST API is organized and normalized in the state. This "normalization" of the data means the data is organized in the state in a way so there's no duplicated data in it and there's only one source of truth.
The state works with two main concepts: links and entities.
The state is designed so that you can know which entities correspond to which link, and then access the data of these entities in a simple way.
Because of this there's a 2 step process to get the information from a link:
Get the data related to the link
Get the data related to the entities available in that link
For the data to exist, it will be necessary to request them previously using the fetch
action.
If you want to know more about how to use the wp-source
package, here you have some videos where the Frontity DevRel team talks about it:
API Reference
The wp-source
package implements the interface defined in the source
package and adds some extra API.
Actions
Actions don't return data. Data is always accessed via the state. That's because Frontity is following the Flux pattern (like Redux).
Read more about actions here.
actions.source.fetch()
actions.source.fetch()
This action fetches all entities related to a link
, i.e. the pathname of a URL in your site.
It populates the state with both:
An entry in
state.source.data
with information about that link.Normalized entities in relevant part of the state, like
state.source.post
,state.source.category
orstate.source.author
and so on.
Syntax
Arguments
Return value
All received data are populated in state.source
and are accessible using the methods explained in the next section.
Even though actions don't return data, they return a promise that resolves when the action is finished.
So, you can do something like this:
which is useful when you need to access the new state just after calling the action:
In React components, you won't need to use async/await
with fetch
because:
useEffect
doesn't directly acceptasync
functions although it can containasync
functionsThey re-render when the
state
accessed changes.
When fetch
is called again for the same link
it does nothing, as all the entities have already been fetched and there is no need to request them again. If you do want to fetch them again, you can pass an options object to source.fetch
with force: true
:
The use of actions.source.fetch()
is recommended over other isomorphic methods to fetch data such as axios
or superagent
, because:
It does not increase the bundle size
It prevents Frontity projects from having duplicated libraries doing the same job
The use of actions.source.fetch()
is also recommended over window.fetch
because although window.fetch
exists in the browser it is not isomorphic and doesn't exist in Node.
Relationship with state.router.autoFetch
Every time you go to a new link from the Client Side (by using actions.router.set
for example) a new fetch should be done for that new link so the data of that link is properly populated to the state.
Thanks to the settings property state.router.autoFetch
with a default value of true, every time you browse to a new page (Client Side Navigation) the fetch of the data in that page will we done automatically for you.
Have a look at this video to learn more about this:
State
state.source.get()
state.source.get()
Returns an object that gives you info about the type of that link and related entities.
Syntax
Arguments
Return value
For exampe:
will return something like:
The information to distinguish each type of link is based on the WP Template Hierarchy and is as follows:
archives:
isArchive
taxonomy:
isTaxonomy
category:
isCategory
tag:
isTag
deal:
isDeal
author:
isAuthor
postTypeArchive:
isPostTypeArchive
post:
isHome
,isPostArchive
(isFrontPage
optional)product:
isProductArchive
date:
isDate
postTypes:
isPostType
post:
isPost
page:
isPage
(isFrontPage
optional)product:
isProduct
media:
isMedia
,isAttachment
404:
is404
Additionally, if calling get()
has returned a status code higher than 400
, we add information about the error to the state. For example, if an error code was 500
, the state will include the following properties:
Properties added to each type are also based on the WP REST API:
taxonomy:
taxonomy
,id
author:
id
postTypeArchive:
type
date:
year
,month
,date
postType:
type
,id
state.source[taxonomy][id]
state.source[taxonomy][id]
Access category, tag, or custom taxonomy’s entities. These entities have the same schema as specified in the WP REST API.
We are actually changing the WP REST API response, but only for tags, in which we are replacing the taxonomy
value from post_tag
to tag
.
state.source[type][id]
state.source[type][id]
Access posts, pages, attachments or custom post type’s entities. These entities have the same schema as specified in the WP REST API.
state.source.author[id]
state.source.author[id]
Access author entities. These entities have the same schema as specified in the WP REST API.
Libraries
libraries.source.api.get()
libraries.source.api.get()
Request entity from the WordPress REST API.
Syntax
Arguments
Return value
For more info, visit the WP REST API reference.
Example
libraries.source.populate()
libraries.source.populate()
Add entities to the Frontity state.
Arguments
Return value
Entities are normally never overwritten. So, if an entity already exists in the state and a new one is fetched, the one in the state will prevail. If you want to overwrite them, populate
should be called with force: true
.
Example
libraries.source.handlers
libraries.source.handlers
Handlers are objects that associate a path pattern with a function that gets the entities contained in that path. These handlers
are used when actions.source.fetch
is called.
A handler is defined by an object with the following properties:
The func property
Arguments
The func
property defined will receive an object with the following properties
Return
libraries.source.handlers
is an array., so to add new handlers we can use libraries.source.handlers.push()
Example
libraries.source.redirections
libraries.source.redirections
Redirections are objects that associate a path pattern with a function that returns a new path. These redirections
are used when actions.source.fetch
is executed, before handlers
.
A redirection is defined by an object with the following properties:
The func property
Arguments
The func
property defined will receive an object with the following properties
Return
Example
libraries.source.parse()
libraries.source.parse()
Utility for parsing links.
Syntax
Arguments
Return value
libraries.source.stringify()
libraries.source.stringify()
Utility for building links from its attributes.
Syntax
Arguments
Return value
libraries.source.normalize()
libraries.source.normalize()
Syntax
Arguments
Return value
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