Book Image

WordPress Mobile Applications with PhoneGap

By : Eugene Liang
Book Image

WordPress Mobile Applications with PhoneGap

By: Eugene Liang

Overview of this book

With the explosive popularity of mobile apps and its much anticipated continued growth for the foreseeable future, developers will want to get their hands dirty and build some cool mobile apps. But we know that building mobile apps is not easy: we need to handle cross-platform issues, mobile devices of different screen sizes, not to mention traditional issues such as providing a content management system of the content served in the application. Enter "WordPress Mobile Applications with PhoneGap". We leverage on some of the most popular open source projects: Wordpress, jQuery, jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap and discover how they can be pieced together to build a fully functional cross platform mobile application. "WordPress Mobile Applications with PhoneGap" teaches you how to build mobile application with minimal effort and coding by leveraging on some of the most popular open source projects such as Wordpress, jQuery, jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap. This book looks at some of the most popular open source projects: Wordpress, jQuery, jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap and breaks down the nitty gritty details on how to leverage on these projects to build a fully functional cross-platform mobile application with minimal coding and effort. You will start off by quickly going through the capabilities of Wordpress. Then you will prepare some groundwork on how to make use of plugins and the GeoPlaces theme to provide geographic and API capabilities to WordPress. Next you will learn how to create an external HTML/CSS/JavaScript that consumes and posts data to your Wordpress blog. More importantly, you will see how to convert this external app into a PhoneGap in as little as five minutes. Finally, you will learn how to apply all these techniques and skills to a Wordpress app based on the Twenty-Ten theme and create a cross-platform mobile app using PhoneGap. By the end of "Wordpress Mobile Applications with PhoneGap" you will learn how to piece Wordpress, jQuery, jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap together into a fully functional mobile app.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Introducing the JSON-API plugin


The JSON-API plugin can be downloaded from https://github.com/Achillefs/wp-json-api. The documentation for the API is found at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/json-api/other_notes/. Note that we are not using the official plugin, as it does not support creating data from a third-party application. Let us quickly get started by installing the plugin.

Installation

Here's how we can install the plugin:

  1. Visit the URL stated in the previous paragraph and download the plugin. Once you have downloaded the plugin, unzip and upload the contents to the /wp-contents/plugins/ folder.

  2. Go to your admin home page and navigate to the plugins page. Activate the JSON-API plugin. Now go to Settings | JSON API and you should see the following:

  3. Activate the Posts controller as we will need it later. Now that we have installed the plugin successfully, let's move on to the next step.

Exploring the JSON-API plugin

For a start, click on the link get_author_index; you should see the...