So I finally bashed through learning to use JSON and VaRest with Wordpress to authenticate users (among other things), and figured there were likely enough people having similar issues, and that a tutorial on how I did it might be in order.
NOTE: I also created custom data in the WP user table (such as player stats), that are not user accessible fields and was able to pull that data via some modifications to the JSON API plugin for wordpress, as well as still display them on the user profile.
ADVISORY: Everything I have done so far is done on a localhost, though with some spoofed domain urls, so it would work just as well live online. But as such I am not currently focusing on the security aspect yet. (I am not using SSL as of now, and my auth requests are flagged with a “&insecure=cool” tag.) The tutorial would continue to be updated as I hammer out more details, but this will not be advised for direct use in a production environment without modification.
It’ll take me a few days to get the tutorial ready, I just want to gauge interest in it to if anyone would even need such a thing.