[gatsby-source-wordpress] Improves README, “permalinks should not be set to Plain”

[kennethormandy]

Updates the documentation to explain the WordPress “Plain” permalinks issue in #1871, which I also encountered. It’s fixed by switching the permalink setting, as described #1871 (comment) here, and now in the docs.

A more comprehensive fix might be to support the query parameter URL style in the plugin too, like http://demo.wp-api.org/?rest_route=/ (found here WP-API/WP-API#1489 (comment)).

I think it’s worth supporting this in the plugin itself, because WordPress default seems to be Plain permalinks, so the WP JSON API is off if you are starting from a fresh install. Should the Plain url be a config option that is off by default?

Thanks for the ongoing hard work on Gatsby :)

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[m-allanson]

Thanks!

[m-allanson]

It sounds like your proposed change would fix this issue for everyone? If so then it'd be good to add it to gatsby-source-wordpress.

[pieh]

Adding support for no prettylinks might be a little bit tricky - for example for this option:

// Exclude specific routes using glob parameters
// See: https://github.com/isaacs/minimatch
// Example:  `["/*/*/comments", "/yoast/**"]` will exclude routes ending in `comments` and
// all routes that begin with `yoast` from fetch.
excludedRoutes: ["/*/*/comments", "/yoast/**"],

But I agree it would be nice to handle this.

[kennethormandy]

It looks like it would be possible just to change from the default URL to the format that works with the Plain permalinks.

The case @pieh mentioned is a good observation but should be fine, since the URL structure is the same after the different prefix. I don’t know if there are other WordPress-specific reasons not to make this the default though—the WP documentation seems very committed to the /wp-json endpoint, and only mentions the ?rest_route= endpoint once.

@m-allanson I can open a PR to make this change if you want, but it would be good to have someone more specialised in the WordPress REST API take a look too.