The WordPress showcase submission form doesn't recognise (REST API) projects as WordPress projects

[petya]

Hey everyone,

I tried to submit ustwo.com for the WordPress showcase on .org today as it's a nice example of using WordPress as a headless cms combined with a JavaScript front end.

After filling out all the fields on this page and submitting, I got the following message:

"Whoops! We didn't detect WordPress at the given URL. Please submit the URL of a site running WordPress."

(​https://wordpress.org/showcase/submit-a-wordpress-site/#return)

I feel as there will be more and more projects using the WordPress REST API, if we'd like to showcase them, we might want to fix the problem with the submission form.

[Otto42]

That site seems to have gone to a rather extreme amount of effort to hide the fact that they're running WordPress. Therefore, it is not suitable for the showcase, IMO. At least add the normal generator string back to the header or something.

[iandunn]

I'm guessing they're not intentionally trying to hide it, they just aren't generating the header with WP, so they would have had to think to explicitly add it.

@petya, what's the reason WP is running on a different domain than the front-end?

I don't see anything in the front-end source code or HTTP headers that we could use to programmatically determine the site is running on WP.

Matt mentioned a similar issue in the 2015 State of the Word, because sites like this will also be skipped by W3Tech stats. He wondering about creating some kind of standard header/meta tag/etc, so maybe that's what we need here too.

[petya]

I couldn't comment on the technical decisions, unfortunately. I could ask some of the developers who worked on it to join the discussion (@rmccue would be a good one, or @joehoyle).

I just expect that now with the REST API in and with more project running WordPress in a similar way, that will become more and more of an issue.

[Otto42]

It probably will become more of an issue. However, iandunn is correct: If we can't tell it's running WordPress, then other metrics systems will have the same issue.

All they have to do to fix it and get their site to be recognized is to add that generator header. We do recognize that header for detection purposes.

[coffee2code]

The discussion above adequately explains that we have no means of checking if WP is back-ending a site unless the front-end has some indicator of it (e.g. a generator tag). If it does, it can be detected. Otherwise, us and other metric-gathering sites won't know WP is involved.

If Ian's notion of a standardized tag/identifier is still of interest, it should be opened as a dedicated ticket.

As such, and since there hasn't been any activity in this ticket for over 4 years, I'm closing this out.