December 3, 2015
  • All
  • Ionic

How Ionic is turning WordPress Developers into Mobile Developers

Katie Ginder-Vogel

ionic-and-wordpress

At Ionic, we focus on open web technologies, which are available to anyone with an internet connection, so that as many people as possible can build mobile apps in a cost-effective way.

Like WordPress, the top web publishing platform in the world, which seeks to “democratize publishing, one website at a time”, Ionic seeks to change the future of mobile development, so that anyone can build beautiful, performant mobile apps for all the app stores.

“Ionic and WordPress have many parallels,” says Scott Bolinger of AppPresser, creators of Reactor. “Ionic has become a gateway to app development, similar to how WordPress is a gateway to web development. It’s so easy to create great apps that it makes you want to dig deeper.”

Bolinger noted that Ionic is creating a micro-economy around an open source product, the same way WordPress did. “That’s great for developers, but it also helps businesses get high quality multi-platform apps more affordably,” says Bolinger. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Ionic apps become the #1 app publishing platform, just like WordPress is to the web.”

Reactor takes advantage of the parallels between Ionic and WordPress, allowing an Ionic app to connect to a WordPress site.

“It’s still difficult for non-developers to use Ionic to build an app that connects to a WordPress site,” says Bolinger. “That’s where Reactor comes in. It allows anyone to build an Ionic app that integrates almost any content from WordPress with no coding. We’ve been updating our platform so that it’s easy to make a great app with the latest Ionic codebase.”

Julien Renaux, author of a popular tutorial about how to build an app using Ionic, WordPress, and Angular, created an open source project, the WordPress Hybrid Client (WPHC), as a way to promote his blog, which runs with WordPress.

“As I often talk about Ionic and AngularJS on my blog, the idea to use Ionic came up naturally,” Renaux says. “The performance and the user experience were so good (rated 5 stars on Google Play) that I decided to open source it.”

WPHC offers developers a startup kit written in ES6 that enables WP-API v2 capabilities out of the box, for free. Add your REST API address in the config and get free access to posts, pages, authors, taxonomies, comments, bookmarks, and accessibility.

“It has never been easier for developers to create an application based on WordPress data that fast,” says Renaux.

Renaux has added several unique features:

  • The ability to query every WP-API v2 endpoint, using the wp-api-angularjs library, which allows developers to query anything out of WP-API without knowing the entities path. This convenient feature can be used outside WPHC.
  • Free, self-hosted Push Notifications for WordPress, by Delite Studio. Instead of using a third-party service to send push notifications to iOS, Android, and Fire OS devices, which can get expensive, you can use your own WordPress server for free.
  • Offline mode (Bookmarks)
  • A robust community that has translated WPHC into nine languages.

“As one of the most advanced open source projects in the hybrid industry, Ionic is to me a perfect fit to work with the most popular CMS in the world,” says Renaux. “Both projects have an amazing community to help them grow, are both highly customizable products–even truer now that the Ionic Market is out–and they are both constantly pushing the web development industry forward.”

Here at Ionic, we’re all in on the web. We love the idea of contributing to the future of the web development ecosystem, and we’re looking forward to hearing about future projects that leverage the power of Ionic, WordPress, and the web. As always, let us know how you’ve used Ionic in interesting ways–we’re all ears!


Katie Ginder-Vogel