What you get when you don’t use an API
The current version of my WordPress OCD Plugin Stats plugin, is somewhat… clunky.1 When I wrote it I didn’t know that WordPress.org had an API for it’s plugin statistics.2 Thus, the current version essentially scrapes particular WordPress.org plugin pages for information and drops it into the WordPress dashboard.
After poking into the stats on one of my plugin pages the other day I discovered that the source code for the page included several calls to a WordPress.org API. Why should I bother scraping and interpreting a page of HTML when I can just ask WordPress.org to deliver the exact data I need in a nifty JSON format?! I’m very much looking forward to adjusting this plugin to use a more direct and simple call to the WordPress API rather than scraping plugin pages.
In any case, if you’re looking for documentation on this, I found a page in the WordPress Codex and a site with a page devoted to documenting the WordPress.org API.
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