WordPress is a free and popular open source Content Management System (CMS) that started life as a simple blogging system. It evolved over the years and its look, feel, and capabilities can be easily extended by its themes and plugins.
We will quickly go through the capabilities of WordPress and see how we can leverage on WordPress to build mobile applications of it. The two main capabilities of WordPress that we can leverage on are: themes and plugins.
Themes in general control the look and feel of any WordPress installation. Going over to http://WordPress.org/extend/themes/, you will see a wide selection of themes that you can download and try for free (most of the time).
For a start, navigate to your WordPress site on your web browser. If you have not made any changes to the site, you should see something like the following on your screen:
Home page of your WordPress installation if you did not make any changes to it
The
earlier screenshot is the default theme of WordPress. Now log in to your WordPress site at http://localhost/public_html/wordpress_phonegap/wp-admin and navigate to Appearance. You should see that the Available Themes option provides you with another theme to play with, called Twenty Ten. Click on Activate and navigate to your home page again. You should see the following:
The Twenty Ten theme
The look and feel of your WordPress site is now changed. With a wide variety of themes out there, you can quickly and easily make changes to how your site looks and feels in just a matter of seconds.
Note that we can easily create a mobile website with WordPress by using a mobile theme or themes that support mobile devices. This may be a quick and easy way to create mobile applications out of WordPress, but it does not provide a native interface for the application. Later in this book we will learn about PhoneGap, which is a great way to build native mobile apps using web development techniques. We will be using two themes for this book: one is the GeoPlaces theme that we will be using from Chapter 3, Extending WordPress Using JSON-API, to Chapter 5, Extending WordPress to the Mobile World; the other theme we will be using is the Twenty Ten theme that comes by default with all WordPress installations. We will be covering the Twenty Ten theme in Chapter 6, Using Open Source Themes, of this book.
As with all good CMSs, WordPress provides an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows developers to quickly and easily extend the functionalities of a WordPress site. Examples of uses of plugins include adding Facebook's popular "Like" button to each of your posts and extending the administration side of WordPress, such as user management, and adding in search engine optimization capabilities to your WordPress.
While this book is not about developing plugins for WordPress, it's good to understand the power of WordPress plugins. A good example as to how far plugins can take your WordPress site is WordPress's very own BuddyPress (http://codex.buddypress.org) plugin. We will not be making use of BuddyPress in this book, but it's good to see it in action for the purposes of this section:
Log in to your WordPress site and navigate to Plugins | Add New.
Search for BuddyPress.
You can install BuddyPress by clicking on Install Now, and in no time you will have a working social networking site.
This is the power of WordPress plugins. In this book, we will check out an awesome plugin, called JSON API (http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins/json-api/), which can be readily adapted and used for extending our WordPress website.