Welcome back to our tutorial on building themes with JavaScript. In part one, we considered the JavaScript web landscape and looked at where we are today. I suggested that while JavaScript lets us render content in new and interesting ways, there are challenges when it comes to fetching the content in the first place.

Watch the video presentation or read the written transcript below.

Screencast

Demo Materials

You’ll find accompanying material for this screencast available in a public GitHub repo — each screencast has a corresponding folder with very simple theme that can be activated.

Time for a REST

With traditional WordPress themes, we’ve been able to use all manner of loops and custom queries to get data. In shifting our approach to be less PHP-centric, where will our data come from?

The missing piece of our puzzle is a REST API, essentially an HTTP interface for getting data from…