WordPress VIP Developer Workshop Napa, California - May 5, 2015

1. Live Coverage at
The New York Times
WordPress VIP Developer Workshop
Napa, California - May 5, 2015

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

3. Blogs at the New York Times
• The 00s were the glory days
for Blogs and WordPress
• Separate from the rest of the
codebase (NYT4)
• Global NYTimes CSS and JS,
CSS for all Blogs, custom CSS
per-blog
• A universe that assumed
jQuery AND Prototype were
loaded on the page in global
scope

4. What could possibly go
wrong here?

5. • 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 (4 diff versions)

6. No shared modules
• Code/HTML markup can get out of sync with other
projects regularly (header/footer/nav)
• The CSS and JS files split across multiple SVN
repos - changes to global assets can affect us
without us knowing. Fixing the code requires
scouring through multiple repos.
• The blogs team divided front-end and back-end
responsibilities. Typically, no one had a full view of
features or the architecture as a whole

7. At the NYT, we don’t use …
• WordPress Comments: There is an entire team that deals with
these for the site globally, in a different system called CRNR
• 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

8. Live Blogs at the Times
Since 2008

9. • 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)

10. As Time Went On, A Mess
to Update and Maintain

11. The Next Iteration:
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!

12. 2013: The New Frontier
I arrived at the New York Times

16. NYT5
• NYT5 “apps” are Git repos that are transformed via
Grunt into a new directory structure. 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, JS is Require.
• PHP for shared components has Composer
dependencies and uses namespaces - the
directories are expanded via Grunt in accordance
with PSR-0 Autoloading Standard

17. NYT5 Dealbreakers
• We can’t just point at WordPress on every request
and have our code figure out routing. Apache
points to app.php in NYT5
• 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
SymfonyHttpFoundation

18. 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.

19. • We can inherit the global Varnish setup and ditch
Batcache
• Instead of rendering media HTML, our [nytmedia]
shortcodes can just output “markers”
• The NYT5 logic for articles already knows to replace
these markers with markup that is generated from shared
modules - and the data is fetched using parallel HTTP
from internal asset stores (JSON).
• At the end of the day, we were able to eradicate a lot of
old, terrible code and lean on code from foundation
and shared repos

20. What about the old code that
used inline Prototype JS code?
• I wrote a filter on ‘the_content’ that does a quick string
scan to see if one of the old slideshows exists in post’s
content. If it does, I wrote RegEx that replaces the
slideshow blob on the fly with a new blob that leverages
our Require code.
I am not proud of this, but it works, and it replaces the
need to migrate potentially 100s or 1000s of posts in the
database.
• Whenever I can, I choose to not ignore legacy or archival
content - since it’s all still searchable on the net, why let it
die a death by Prototype?

21. 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

22. First Draft
Lens
Live Coverage

25. What if…
• Instead of using those custom tables
and all of that weird code, we could
actually create new object types:
events and updates!
• To create a new “Live Blog”: you only
need to create an event, then go to a
Backbone-powered screen to add
updates
• Even if WordPress isn’t desired for the
front end, it could be the backend for
anything that wants a JSON feed for
live event data
• Because we would be using custom
post types, building a Live Event UI
that looks like the NYT5 theme would
be nominal

26. • 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
• Our first real foray into using the JSON API (WP-
API)
• Our plan was just to be admin to produce data via
self-service URLs
What we did

27. Live Events
The new Live Blogs

28. Complete Rewrite of 2008 code
• nytimes.com/live/{event} and nytimes.com/live/{event}/
{update}
• Brand new admin interface: Backbone app that uses the
WP-API. Constantly updated filterable stream - Backbone
collections that re-fetch on Heartbeat tick
• Custom JSON 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

31. Responsive
on Mobile

32. Some gotchas…

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

34. $hook = add_menu_page( . . . );
add_action( “load-$hook”, ‘custom_load’ );
function old_custom_load() {
if ( ‘POST’ !== $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_METHOD’] ) {
return;
}
. . .
}
function new_custom_load() {
if ( ‘GET’ === $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_METHOD’] ) {
return;
}
. . .
}

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

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

37. Custom JSON Endpoints for POST
• Use fire-and-forget technique on save, 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

38. Register a route:
$routes[ '/live-events/(?P<post_id>d+)/sns' ] = array(
array(
array( $this, 'live_event_sns' ),
WP_JSON_Server::CREATABLE
),
);
$routes[ '/async-cream-invalidation' ] = array(
array(
array( $this, 'async_cream' ),
WP_JSON_Server::CREATABLE
),
);

39. Handle the route:
public function async_cream() {
$urls = array_map( 'stripslashes', $_POST['urls'] );
if ( $urls ) {
nyt_cream_invalidation( $urls );
}
exit();
}

40. Trigger the process:
NYT_Admin_JSON::async_request(
'/async-cream-invalidation',
array(
‘body’ => array(
'urls' => $urls
)
)
);

41. 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

42. An “Interactive
Promo” on an
article page

43. Questions?