What Is a REST API?

A REST API is a standard way for one system to communicate with another over the web.

Instead of a person clicking buttons on a website, a program can send a request directly to another system and receive a response back.

Simple way to think about it

You can imagine it like this:

• Your Python script = the customer
• WordPress = the kitchen
• REST API = the waiter

Your script tells the API what it wants to do, and the API passes that request to WordPress. WordPress then sends back the result.

What does it do?

A REST API allows programs to work with data such as:

• posts
• pages
• users
• categories

For example, with WordPress, a script can:

• create a blog post
• read existing posts
• update a post
• delete a post

How it works

REST APIs usually use:

• URLs to represent data or resources
• HTTP methods to describe the action
• JSON to send and receive data

A WordPress API endpoint for posts looks like this:

https://yourwebsite.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts

This URL represents the posts resource.

Common HTTP methods

The main methods are:

• GET → read data
• POST → create data
• PUT / PATCH → update data
• DELETE → delete data

Examples:

• GET /posts → get blog posts
• POST /posts → create a new post
• PATCH /posts/123 → update post 123
• DELETE /posts/123 → delete post 123

Why this matters

A REST API makes automation possible.

Instead of manually logging into WordPress and creating a post, a Python script can do it for you.

That means you can automate tasks such as:

• daily blog posting
• saving posts as drafts
• updating content automatically
• posting data from another source

Simple example

Imagine your script sends this data to WordPress:

{
  "title": "Daily blog",
  "content": "Today I want to write about..."
}

It is basically saying:

Please create a new post with this title and content.

WordPress may respond with something like:

{
  "id": 101,
  "title": "Daily blog",
  "status": "draft"
}

This means the post was created successfully.

Python example

Here is a simple example of Python creating a draft post in WordPress through its REST API:

import requests
from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuthurl = "https://yourwebsite.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts"data = {
    "title": "My first API post",
    "content": "Created from Python",
    "status": "draft"
}response = requests.post(
    url,
    auth=HTTPBasicAuth("your_username", "your_app_password"),
    json=data
)print(response.json())

In short

A REST API is a web-based interface that allows one program to send instructions and data to another in a standard format.

In the case of WordPress:

1. Python sends a request
2. WordPress receives it
3. WordPress returns a response

That is the basic idea behind a REST API.