A straightforward, example-based guide to leveraging your web development skills to build mobile applications using WordPress, jQuery, jQuery Mobile, and PhoneGap

Overview

Discover how we can leverage on Wordpress as a content management system and serve content to mobile apps by exposing its API
Learn how to build geolocation mobile applications using Wordpress and PhoneGap
Step-by-step instructions on how you can make use of jQuery and jQuery mobile to provide an interface between Wordpress and your PhoneGap app

In Detail

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.

What you will learn from this book

Learn about the capabilities of Wordpress
Take advantage of geographic capabilities of Wordpress via the GeoPlaces Theme
Expose an API from Wordpress
Create an external app using HTML/CSS/JavaScript that interfaces with Wordpress
Convert an HTML/CSS/JavaScript app to a PhoneGap application
Code for a PhoneGap app interfacing with a Wordpress blog
Learn tips and tricks on how to test your mobile app on a browser before testing it on your emulator

Approach

This is a practical step-by-step tutorial.

Who this book is written for

If you are a developer with basic knowledge of Wordpress, HTML/CSS/JavaScript seeking to understand how to further your knowledge in creating cross-platform mobile applications using PhoneGap, then this book is for