How Can I Incorporate my WordPress Blogs into an iOS app?

Question

How Can I Incorporate my WordPress Blogs into an iOS app? I have a beautiful word press site and I want to create a native iOS app. I have knowledge of coding for iOS, but I just don't know how I would go about showing all the latest blogs that are up in a beautiful way.

Thanks in Advance!

Answer 1

There are many ways you can achieve that. Here is a list of things you need to do in order to make an iOS app for your WordPress blog:

1) You need to parse the data from your WordPress blog to display it inside your iOS app. You can do it by parsing your blog's RSS feed you can parse JSON.

2) If you are planning to parse the RSS feed, use NSXMLParser to do that. There are other third party libraries available that parse the XML feeds but i would suggest to go with the built in NSXMLParser as there is plenty of help available online for it.

3) If you are planning to parse JSON data, install Feed JSON plugin on your WordPress blog. Once installed, you can go to http://example.com/feed/json to get the JSON data. (You can replace example.com with your blog's URL)

4) To connect to the web services like XML feed and JSON on your blog, you can use third party libraries like AFNetworking or you can use Apple's built in libraries like NSURLConnection and other classes to connect and download the data from the webservice.

5) Here are some very easy tutorials for the steps above. How to Use NSURLConnection, How to fetch JSON or How To Parse RSS with NSXmlParser

You can start your app by completing the above steps and getting started.

6) After that one of the most important thing is to download images asynchronously in the UITableViewCells where you are displaying your blog posts. I would suggest you to download a video from Stanford University's iOS programming course on iTunes U that shows how to do it or you can simply find some tutorials or look for questions on StackOverflow.

7) Then you have to create a UIWebView and when the row of any blog post inside the UITableView is tapped, you can use the link to segue in the UIWebView to show the actual blog post. You can use didSelectRowAtIndexPath in order to pass data between view controllers.

8) Below the view controller that contains the UIWebView, you can add functions like stop, refresh, sharing on Facebook and Twitter etc.

9) As you can see that is a lot of work and business people just think that its easy to develop an iOS app but the truth is that it takes some time to completely package the app and submit to the App Store. You can also outsource your project by using service like Convert WordPress Blog To iOS App that is completely for free if you share revenue with them but its your choice and i recommend you to code it yourself to have complete ownership of you app.

Rest is just a matter of choice of different functions you would like to make in your app to stand out from the rest. You can add a Facebook style sliding navigation controller on the left side to create and parse specific categories on your blog, you can use Flipboard style swiping in your Web View etc etc. For that stuff there are a lot of third party libraries available.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

You can read an answer of mine about cloud based ios apps (the db is online) here: press me

now as i said, to get info from the server you need to use JSON, in wordpress there is a very good and simple plugin for that: JSON API

now the use of that is simple, you can see it in the notes: http://wordpress.org/plugins/json-api/other_notes/

but for example for getting the last posts in the system you need to run the url: http://www.example.org/api/get_recent_posts/

The /api means it's the plugin (you can change that in the settings) and the /get_recent_posts/ is the function.

there are many other functions like this one for everything you need and it can get more complicated than that based on what you want to get from the db.

After running the "query" and getting a response in JSON you need to use it: Working with JSON in iOS 5 Tutorial
now for the running of the url i recommend to use AFNetworking

now all you need to do is use the json string you get for getting out info. this would have some more issues like managing html codes you get in the content respons and so but it's the start, develop your way up :)