REST In Action: The Live Coverage Platform at the New York Times

REST In Action: The Live Coverage Platform at the New
York Times WordCamp US Philadelphia, PA - December 4, 2015

Scott Taylor • Core Developer, WordPress  Release Lead for 4.4
• Sr. Software Engineer, The New York Times • @wonderboymusic on Twitter/ Instagram/Swarm et al • I like Music, NYC, and Mexican food

2013 - Present Me at the New York Times

WordPress at the NYT now • some “legacy” blogs •
Lens - Photography blog • First Draft • some internal corporate sites • NYT Co. • Women of the World • Times Journeys • The Live Coverage platform • some forthcoming International projects

WordPress 4.4 Lead • REST API (Phase 1) • Term
Meta • Responsive Images • WordPress as oEmbed Provider • Tons of under the hood stuff

Blogs Team at The New York Times

Blogs at the NYTimes • NYT used WordPress very early
• NYT was an early investor in Automattic • Multisite • ~80 blogs at the height of blog mania - the 00s were the glory days for Blogs and WordPress • Many blogs used Live Blogging

When I arrived: Legacy Blogs Codebase • Separate from the
rest of the NYT’s PHP codebase • Global NYTimes CSS and JS, CSS for all Blogs, custom CSS per-blog • A universe that assumed jQuery AND Prototype were loaded on every page in global scope • Challenging amounts of what could generously be called “technical debt”

<html> <head> <script src="prototype.js"></script> <script src="jquery.js"></script> </head> <script> jQuery('#good-times').click( ...
); $$('.prototype').whatever(); </script>

What could possibly go wrong here?

• Inline HTML from 2008 that assumes Prototype will still
be a thing in 2015, stored in post_content • Widgets and inline code that add their own version of jQuery/Prototype, because YOLO • Even better: widgets/modules from other teams that use a different version of jQuery … at times there could be 4 jQuerys on the page (and 4 different versions at that) Things Like ….

No shared modules • Code/HTML markup can get out of
sync with other projects regularly: header, footer, navigation • The CSS and JS ﬁles were split across multiple SVN repos - changes to global assets can affect us without us knowing. Fixing the code requires scouring through multiple repos.

At the NYT • No WordPress Comments: There is an
entire team that deals with these for the site globally, in a different system called CRNR • No Media: There is another CMS at the Times, Scoop, which stores the images, videos, slideshows, etc • WordPress native post-locking: This only landed in WordPress core in version 3.6 (we have yet to reconcile the differences) • There is layer for Bylines which is separate from Users: Our users are employees authenticated via LDAP, most post authors don’t actually enter the content themselves

NYT5: The New Frontier My arrival at the New York
Times coincided with the NYT5 project, already in progress

NYT5 • Development requires Vagrant environment • “apps” are Git
repos that require Grunt to transpile the codebase - you can’t run your repo as a website: it has to be built • Impossible to create a “theme” this time with shared JS and CSS. CSS is SASS build, JS is Require build - both dynamically built for each app. • PHP has Composer dependencies and uses namespaces - the directories are expanded via Grunt in accordance with PSR-0 Autoloading Standard

require( ['jquery'], function ($) { $('#cool-link').click(...); } ); require( ['jquery/1.9'],
function ($) { $('#cool-link').click(...); } ); require( ['jquery/2.0'], function ($) { $('#cool-link').click(...); } ); Require.js fixed the jQuery problem

NYT5 Dealbreakers • We can’t just point at WordPress on
every request and have our code ﬁgure out routing. Routing happens in Apache in NYT5 - most requests get piped to app.php • Because PHP Namespaces are used, WP has to load early and outside of them (global scope) • On the frontend, WP cannot exit prematurely before hitting the framework, which returns the response to the server via Symfony\HttpFoundation

Apache NYT5: app.php Route to NYT5 Blogs app - Load
initial ﬁles  - Bootstrap WP - Capture WP content - WP complete - Initialize app

NYT5 Advantages • “shared” modules - we inherit the “shell”
of the page, which includes: navigation, footer, login, etc. • our nyt5 theme doesn’t need to produce an entire HTML document, just the “content” portion • With WP in global scope, all of its code is available even when we hit the MVC parts of the NYT5 framework. • WP output is captured via an output buffer on load - it’s accessible downstream when the app logic is running.

$wp_query = new WP_Query(); $GLOBALS['wp_query'] = ...   function wp_thing()
{ global $wp_query; . . . } GLOBALS!!!

This could be solved namespace WP;

Namespaces namespace WP; class Query {} function get_post_meta() {} .
. . new \WP\Query(); WP\get_post_meta(); . . . namespace WP; new Query();

Blogs in Transition

Overall: Bad News for Blogs • Blogs were duplicating Section
Fronts, Columns:    Mark Bittman has column in the paper.  The column also exists on the web as an article.   He contributes to the Diner’s Journal blog.   There is a section front for dining.   He also has his own NYTimes blog. Why? • Blogs and WordPress were combined in everyone’s mind. So whenever WordPress was mentioned as a solution for anything, the response was: aren’t blogs going away? #dark

But we still had…    First Draft Lens Live Coverage

2014 Midterm Elections required new Live Blogging tools

2008: Live Blogs at the Times • A Blog would
create a post and check “Start Live Blogging” • the updates related to the post were stored in custom tables in the database • the APIs for interacting with these tables duplicated tons of WordPress functionality • Custom Post Types didn’t exist until WordPress 3.0 (June 2010) - the NYT code was never rewritten to leverage them (would have required porting the content as well)

Live (actual) Blogs: Dashboards/Dashblogs • A Live Blog would be
its own blog in the network, its own set of tables • A special dashboard theme that had hooks to add custom JS/CSS for each individual blog, without baking them into the theme • Making an entirely new site in the network for a 4-hour event is overkill • For every 10 or so new blogs that are added, you are adding 100 new database tables - gross!

What if… • Instead of custom tables and dupe’d API
code, new object types: events and updates! • To create a new “Live Blog”: create an event, then go to a Backbone- powered screen to add updates • If WP isn’t desired for the front end, it could be the backend for anything that wants a JSON feed for live event data • Using custom post types, building a Live Event UI that looks like the NYT5 theme would be nominal

• Built an admin interface with Backbone to quickly produce
content - which in turn could be read from JSON feeds • When saving, the updates post into a service we have called Invisible City (wraps Redis/Pusher) • Our ﬁrst real foray into using the REST API • Our plan was just to be an admin to produce data via self-service URLs What we did

Live Events, the new Live Blogs: Complete Rewrite of 2008
code • nytimes.com/live/{event} and nytimes.com/live/{event}/ {update} • Brand new admin interface: Backbone app that uses the REST API. Constantly updated ﬁlterable stream - Backbone collections that re-fetch on Heartbeat tick • Custom REST endpoints that handle processes that need to happen on save • Front end served by WordPress for SEO, but data is received by web socket from Invisible City and rendered via React

Responsive on Mobile

An “Interactive Promo” on an article page

2015: “Blogs” team becomes “WordPress” team, joins the Interactive News
team

Guess What? • Would rather use Docker instead of Vagrant
• PSR-0 is now PSR-4 • Grunt is now eschewed in favor of Gulp • RequireJS is ok, but I’d rather use Browserify • PHP is cool, but why don’t we use Node and React?

Interactive News Team • Mostly independent • Mostly special News
projects • Mostly use whatever language you want • Mostly does not use NYT5 • Is open to using WordPress, but just as often, does not

What is a Live Coverage platform?

nytimes.com/live/{event} Request is served by WordPress, PHP generates markup React
wraps the "posts" area JS listens to Web Socket Updates are added on the backend (OR via SLACK!) React updates the content

the elections code became useful for Breaking News

WordPress + REST

Register a route: register_rest_route( ‘nyt/v1’, ‘/live-events/(?P<post_id>\d+)’, [ ‘callback’ => [
$this, ‘liveEventRoute’ ], ‘methods’ => \WP_Rest_Server::CREATABLE ] );

Handle the route: public function liveEventRoute( $request ) { $post_id
= $request['post_id']; $response = new \WP_REST_Response( [ 'results' => . . ., ] ); return $response; }

Some REST API gotchas…

Most plugins only handle POST • WP-API and Backbone speak
REST • REST will send you requests via   GET, PUT, DELETE, POST and friends

$hook = add_menu_page( ... ); add_action( "load-$hook", 'callback' ); function
old_custom_load() { if ( 'POST' !== $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] ) { return; } ... } function new_custom_load() { if ( 'GET' === $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] ) { return; } ... }

WordPress becomes a web service • Monolithic mindset needs to
transition into how to make it into a bare metal service provider • The serving of requests should be loosely coupled from objects like WP_Query • WordPress needs to become supportive of concurrency

Custom JSON Endpoints for GET • We do not hit
these endpoints on the front-end • We have a storage mount that is fronted via Varnish and Akamai • JSON feeds can show up on the homepage of the NYT to dynamically render “promos” - these have to massively scale

HTTP is time-consuming • It is easy to lose track
of how many things are happening on the 'save_post' hook • Admin needs to be fast • The front end is typically cached, but page generation shouldn’t be bogged down by HTTP requests • Anything which is time-consuming should be ofﬂoaded to a separate “process” or request who response you don’t need to handle

wp_remote_post( $url, wp_parse_args( [ 'timeout' => 0.01, 'blocking' => false
], $args ) ); Fire and Forget* * Stolen from Mark Jaquith’s nginx cache invalidation technique: wp_remote_get( $url, [ 'timeout' => 0.01, 'blocking' => false, 'headers' => [ 'X-Nginx-Cache-Purge' => '1' ] ] );

Custom REST Endpoints for POST • Use ﬁre-and-forget technique on
'save_post', instead of waiting for responses inline. You can still log/handle/re-try responses in the separate request. • Most things that happen on 'save_post' only need to know $post_id for context, the endpoint handler can call get_post() from there

Trigger the process: NYT\Admin\REST::async_request( '/varnish-invalidation', [ 'urls' => $urls ]
);

Questions?

REST In Action: The Live Coverage Platform at the New York Times

REST In Action: The Live Coverage Platform at the New York Times

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