Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of your website engineer podcast. My name is Dustin, and I’m excited to be here with you, today because, I’ve got an interview lined up, and we’re going to talk about a plug-in, and another tool, a service – if you will – on how we can create a mobile app for a WordPress website. But before we get to that part of the show, I want to tell you about – I have a few announcements that are happening in the WordPress Space.

The first one is, WordPress 4.3 beta one came out last week, on July 2nd, we got our first look at the development software of WordPress 4.3. Now, it’s the first version that’s out, and there will be many more incremental adjustments as we go along. It looks like it’s going to be set to release in August, so we are looking at about a month timeframe before WordPress 4.3 comes out. There’s a couple of things that you can check out if you are nosy like me, and you want to check it out, and try things out.

So the first thing is, menus are now part of the customizer. I talked about that a few episodes back about how it was supposed to be – it was finally approved, and yes, it is in the customizer, which is really nice. You could also take control of your site by adjusting the site icon, both the FAV icon, and the app icon that would show up if somebody would save or bookmark your website to their home screen, of their iPhone, or something like that; you can control that now, within WordPress.

They’ve also improved and worked into better passwords, and how that just makes a generated password so much better and efficient, and keeps your passwords secure when you generate a new admin account, or a new user account for your website. The other thing that really excites me is called, “Editor Improvements.” And this says that certain text patters are automatically transformed as you type. So if you use an asterisk or a dash, it will automatically transition that text into an unordered list, or if you use one and period, or one and parenthesis, it will turn that into an ordered list; which is really cool, or if you look the greater than sign, that will turn it into block quotes.

So it looks – it almost feels like you can just type right markdown – right into WordPress, and it’s just going to start working; so that’s really, really cool as well. And they’ve also improved the list view across the dashboard, especially when you’re on mobile devices, to make sure that you can see everything that’s in those lists, whether they’re poster pages, media; all of that kind of stuff for you. There’s a lot of developer stuff that’s underneath the hood, and so if you’re interested, you can head on over to WordPress.org and download the latest version. Make sure that you look for WordPress 4.3 beta one.

Another thing that I want to share with you today in the “Is there a plug-in for that” section, is a plug-in called “UpdraftPlus backup and restoration.” So you know that I’m a huge fan of back-ups, and I talk about that all the time. The big ones I always name are Backup Buddy, BackWPup, and WordPress backup to DropBox, and of course, VaultPress gets in that list, as well. Well, I always – I was turned on to this one this week, and it’s called “UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration,” and it says, “It’s backup and restoration made easy. You can do complete backups manual, or scheduled, and you can backup to services like Amazon S3, DropBox, Google Drive, Rackspace, FTP, SFTP, email, and more.”

They had – this plug-in has been out for a little while, and it has more than 400,000 active installs, and it’s got a four point nine, out of five star rating. And so there’s hundreds of thousands of users, there’s a lot of people that are interested in using this plug-in, and I think that it’s one that I’d consider to check out. It looks like BackWPup, and so if you’re interested in checking out a plug-in for backups, trying something different, or if you’re just trying out a plug-in for the very first time, I’d highly recommend checkout out UpdraftPlus, and I’ll have a link in the shownotes for this episode, which is episode number 240.

All right, today we are going to be talking about how we can use our WordPress site to use all of the content, the entire thing that we’ve got built on WordPress. How we can use that to create a mobile application that our visitors and users can install on their phones, take it with them, and then easily access our content on the go. So I’ve got a great interview lined up here with Scott, and so with that, let’s go ahead and listen to the interview.

All right, hello everybody, today we are talking with Scott Bollinger from AppPresser, and we’ll be discussing how we can turn our WordPress website into a mobile application both, for IOS and Android. And AppPresser is a new plug-in that kind of came out for the WordPress environment, we’ll dig into that in a little bit. But I actually got to meet Scott at New Media Expo in April of this past year. And we chatted a little bit, and then I just got really interested and I’m like, “I have to have you on the show to just give us more information about AppPresser, and all the things that you can do with it, and how we can really – just really advance our WordPress website.” So Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott: Thanks for having me.

Dustin: Hey, you are welcome. Now, before we really get started and digging dive – or doing a dive in to AppPresser; can you tell us a little bit about your background? How did you get involved with the WordPress community?

Scott: Yeah, I started – actually, as a graphic designer working in-house for a local company here, in about 2007 – or 2006, 2007, and then, gradually got into web design, found a WordPress and loved it, and then, I eventually went off my own, and started doing client work. After about a year or so of that, a year or two, I started a premium theme company, and kind of went down that road for a couple of years, and learned a lot, and it did – it did okay. Then, I started AppPresser in the beginning of 2014, and I have been doing that ever since.

And we released Reactor, at the beginning of this year, so I’ve been kind of doing – done all sides of the WordPress ecosystem, making sites for clients, making products, and then themes, plug-ins, software and service. So that’s kind of where I am now.

Dustin: And what is your favorite?

Scott: My favorite what? Thing to do?

Dustin: Yeah, of those things that you talked about like, is it creating products that is more favorite than working for clients, or just out of curiosity?

Scott: Yeah, definitely creating products. I love creating products because, I really like to build stuff, and I’m not – I’m not great with client relations, doing a lot of phone calls, an d keeping in touch with people, and hearing about everything that they want and need for their sites. I’m better with products, and so I sort of figured that out about myself, and I really enjoy just building stuff, and making it better. Yeah, so that’s what I like.

Dustin: I can see that, I always had the idea like, “Oh, I should create some sort of product, and then just support it.” I ended up starting with automatic before I could actually run down that path. So I see where you’re coming from, and I know that I am not the best with the client relations side of things, either. But what gave you this idea? It had to have been in 2013 or so, what gave you the idea of turning a WordPress site into an app? How did that all come about?

Scott: Actually, it was from Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word in both 2012, and 2013 he mentioned using WordPress as an application framework, and I think – what he was talking about was more like web applications, not as much mobile apps. But for me, I had that kind of – just a light bulb went off about mobile apps, and I kind of thought, “Hey, why don’t we put WordPress into a mobile app?” I thought that would be just kind of something that would be really cool, something that a lot of people would like.

And then, just started kind of expanding on that idea in my head, and approached a couple of different people who ended up partnering up with Brian, Brad, and Lisa from WebDevStudios, and we kind of just flushed it out how it was all going to work. And when we started, we had really no idea how exactly it was going to work. We had some ideas of what we thought we were going to have to do, and it sounded like it was going to be pretty difficult, but we really didn’t know. And as we sort of went down that path and figured it out, we found some ways to do things, and sort of just made it work.

So that was kind of an exciting time, it was stressful because, honestly, when we formed the company – or formed the partnership, we didn’t have a product – we didn’t really know how we were going to do it. And so with each step, we kind of integrated WordPress into a mobile app and said, “Okay, we got that part down,” and then “Can we make the device features work through WordPress?” Like, they can run, and contacts and geolocation and things like that. So then, we would kind of get back work, and it would be really exciting.

And then, we were like, “Okay, push notifications, those are pretty different, so we don’t know if those are actually going to work.” And then, we got those working, and it was really exciting. And then, we were like, “Okay, is Apple going to reject this app for some reason? And if they do, we won’t have a business.” So we submitted an app, and a couple of weeks later, they accepted it and we were like, “We’re in business.”

Dustin: Perfect.

Scott: Yeah, so that was kind of a stressful time because we had no idea how to do any of that stuff, but we figured it all out. And then, as we went through the first year of our business, we learned a lot more stuff, and how to do things in different ways, and better ways. And then, the WPAPI came out, which was kind of like the first year of AppPresser, the WPAPI was just in its infancy. And then, we started looking into using that, which is a totally different way to use WordPress in an app. So as that matured, we built the Reactor pod form off of that. So Reactor has been out since January, and it’s been doing well, and we’re really excited about it.

Dustin: Cool. So let’s go down the path of talking AppPresser first, and so can you8 explain about how this is a premium plug-in that you can purchase from AppPresser.com. But how does – can you explain a little bit of how that works? What’s the process? What happens, do you buy the plug-in, and then you install it, and then what?

Scott: Yeah, so you buy the plug-in, you install it and configure it on your site, and it’s very similar to any other WordPress plug-in. There’s also a theme that goes along with our suite of products. And the way that it works is you install everything, configure it on your site, and then once that’s finished, then you wrap it into an app using PhoneGap – a fairly simple process that we have documentation on. But then, what happens is, you see your WordPress site in your app, so it’s actually loading up your WordPress site, the same thing as if you went to a safari web browser on your iPhone, and you loaded up your WordPress site.

The same thing is happening, except it’s in a mobile app wrapper. And what happens with AppPresser is we switch out the theme, and we enable a bunch of device functionality through this mobile app wrapper. So instead of just viewing it in your web browser, and not being able to do things like push notifications, and contacts, and camera, and all that kind of stuff; we actually wrap it in the app wrapper, so that you can access all of those features. And you can do things like, for example, you can write a short code in a WordPress page that says, “App camera,” and then, when you load that up in the app, and you visit that page, there will be a button there that says “Take photo.”

And you can take a photo, and you can actually upload it through WordPress to your media gallery. And then, we also have integrations with like WooCommerce, where that photo will actually go straight into your product image gallery. And then, we have other integrations for things like BuddyPress, and there’s geolocation, and push notifications, and things like that. But it’s basically your website sort of super charged, and put into an app, and then you can do things that you wouldn’t be able to do if you were just a mobile site.

Dustin: And to do all – and that’s a big statement because, tens of thousands of plug-ins, but do all plug-ins for the most part, work in side of the app itself?

Scott: Most of them work. We haven’t tested, and we can’t officially say we support every plug-in, but there are very few plug-ins that don’t work completely. Some plug-ins need some modifications like, a mobile app works differently than a website does, and most plug-ins are made for websites. So if you take for example, bbPress forums, those work in the app, but they need a little bit of massaging to make it feel like you’re actually in an app, and not just on a website. So a lot of that is CSS styling, and some of it could be a little bit of java script to make things – to make the pages a little with Ajax instead of refreshing, which makes it feel more like an app.

And those are things – like, we’ve done a little bit of integration with BuddyPress to sort of help that along. It’s usually not real complicated work to make something like that happen, but it’s just kind of a little bit of website work. And so the cool part about AppPresser is you can do work on your WordPress website, and then that, in turn, becomes the app. So you don’t have to have mobile app skills to be changing stuff, you can just work with CSS and possibly java script, and Child Themes, and things like that to make the app look different, and behave different; things like that.

Dustin: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and I think that will help a lot of people who want an app, but are very afraid of. I don’t know any coding whatsoever, and don’t want to have to learn how to write an app with Xcode, and all that kind of stuff. I think that’s really, really important. So my next question that I have about AppPresser is, who do you think is AppPresser right for? Is it best for just bloggers, or is it business owners, is it people with stores, or is it the whole gamut of “If you have a WordPress website, then AppPresser will work for you.” What are your thoughts there?

Scott: So I think the best people that AppPresser is for is people who have – businesses who have a WordPress website that’s very customized, has a lot of functionality built into it. So for example, if you have like online ordering – if you’re a restaurant, you have online ordering, and you’ve built this all with like WordPress plug-ins and it goes through like WooCommerce, and it’s all integrated into your payment system, and you do all your business on the website. And it’s very much a big part of your business and has some custom functionality, then a site like that.

If you don’t have a huge budget for an app, then AppPresser is going to be perfect for you. Because, if you were to try to build that type of functionality, any other way, it would cost you thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands; whatever it is to build that. Just the way that mobile apps would work, it’s really, really difficult. So with AppPresser, you just kind of – it just kind of already works.

So any type of businesses, any, be it like a church, a restaurant, fitness, gyms, bloggers; basically, anyone who’s using WordPress, and just wants to put their site in an app without having to rebuild, do a lot of restructuring, coding, in the app side, or pay someone a lot of money to do it. I think that those are the people who would really benefit from AppPresser.

Dustin: Okay. And let’s say we want to create both, we’re going to create an app for both iOS and Android; do we need those actual devices so we can test on, or are there simulators with PhoneGap? How do we make sure that what we’re creating looks good on both sides of those, or both types of devices?

Scott: The easiest way is to just have both devices, but it is possible to fire them up in a simulator. Using the simulator is kind of a pain, and if you’re not a web developer, I wouldn’t recommend diving into that. Even if you are a web developer, just setting the whole thing up, and using Xcode, or eClips, or Android studio, it’s just kind of a pain. So the way that we do it is we use PhoneGap Build to where you actually build the app for both of your devices, and then you just use a QR code to scan it, and get it onto your device, and you can test there; and it’s really easy. But if you don’t have that, you can definitely use one of the emulators.

Dustin: And then, the last question about that is how do we get our app onto the App Store? Is that just a process all through PhoneGap that can do that?

Scott: So there’s a different process for each, for both iOS and Android. So PhoneGap will actually compile the files that you need to send to the App Stores, and there is a process that you have to go through of certification, you have to use your developer account, and add your certificates and provisioning profiles and things to the app for iOS. And then, for Android, they have this release key you need to do. So for Android, it’s fairly straightforward, for iOS, it’s a little less straightforward, but there is – it’s just kind of a documented process we have that you just have to go step-by-step.

So you have to have a developer account, you have to build the app, and then you have to fill out your App Store listing and submit your app to them.

Dustin: Okay. So it sounds like AppPresser is the simpler solution, maybe?

Scott: Yes.

Dustin: Or maybe it isn’t – maybe it’s not. But can we talk a little bit about Reactor? You talked a little bit about that in the beginning; you kind of alluded to it, and that’s going to be something that’s driven more off the WordPress API. And can you talk just a little bit about how Reactor works?

Scott: Sure. If you think of AppPresser as your WordPress website in the app, like it’s the same as visiting a browser, you see all of WordPress, all of WordPress is loaded basically, you see everything there. Reactor works a lot differently because it actually goes to the WordPress API, and it gets your data from that API, and pulls it into the app. So with AppPresser, all of your CSS from java script, your images, all that kind of stuff are on your WordPress website on your server. With Reactor, you actually have all of your CSS and java script is actually in the phone, on the device; it’s actually like a little static website that’s on your phone.

And then, we use the API to pull in data dynamically from the WordPress API. So if you know – if you don’t know about the WordPress API, it’s basically just text, it’s called JSON, which is just text. It says, “Your title of this page is this, and the content on this page is this,” and then we can go in there, and say, “Okay, put the title here, put the content here, put the comments here,” and then that’s that page.

So it’s a different way of doing things, there are several advantages: One, is we can support offline for some parts of it. Number two, is that we can make the app feel a lot more native, we can use a lot of transition – like, java script transitions and models, and a lot of things that sort of feel more app like, stuff that you can’t really do on a website that’s built on PHP. And also, we can make it faster, if we put the files on the devices itself, it’s going to load faster. So there are a lot of advantages.

There are some disadvantages, the biggest one is that a lot of plug-ins are not supported, so through the API, you just can’t – you can’t pull in like say for example, gravity forms, we actually have a support for gravity forms, but it’s sort of a work around. So if you think about the way gravity forms works, it has CSS, java script, and it has PHP form processing, or AJAX form processing; all of that stuff happens on the server. So if you go to an app, you don’t have any of that stuff, like the API does not send you CSS and java script, it does not allow for server site form processing any of that stuff.

So in a mobile app, you can’t do any of that stuff basically, you would have to completely rebuild the form to work with only java script, and send it to the server through java script, and get data back. Anyways, that’s a complicated way of saying that a lot of plug-ins just don’t work partially because, developers have not built in support for the API, but also partially just because it’s a very, very different process, and it’s a lot more complex to make plug-ins work. So our plan with Reactor is not to confuse people, and tell them, “Pick Reactor or AppPresser,” if you have a bunch of stuff on your WordPress site, we say, “Hey, use AppPresser, it’s a great solution for WordPress.”

Our plan with Reactor is to actually support a lot more platforms outside of WordPress. So for example, if you wanted to go grab a bunch of YouTube videos from your YouTube channel, we would be able to pull those in. If you wanted to support other platforms like Joomla, or like static websites, eventually, we’ll help you to be able to do that. And then, it’s also, it’s a software service, so it’s a hosted platform, which means that we can make the app building process a lot smoother, a lot easier to do.

We can add in things like stats, and built-in push notifications, and the page builder that we have makes it really easy to add Google Maps, and things like that. So since we kind of control the environment through our – since it’s on our server, we can make things a lot more user-friendly to actually build the app.

Dustin: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So who do you think that Reactor is perfect for? Earlier, you were saying if you have a lot of people – if you’re using a lot of plug-ins, that’s going to be good for AppPresser. If you’re using Reactor, what type of sites are those going to be best for?

Scott: Sure. I think Reactor is great for – if you have a magazine site, and you have a lot of content, Reactor is going to be great for you. If you have a lot of just pages and posts without a lot of custom functionality and plug-ins and stuff. It’s also great for churches; we have a lot of built-in functionality for churches. And then, anybody who is just kind of an informational site, it’s great for. If you need to – if you want to – like, if we have a media app where if you use the Blubrry PowerPress Podcasting plug-in, you can make that work really well through reactor.

Anyone who needs a little bit of offline support, Reactor works great for them. And then, we’re continuously building out new stuff, we have a lot of stuff sort of in the works for Reactor.

Dustin: Sure, and I can see how a lot of more functionality will come as developers start to – start to really support that WordPress API, and they’re really starting to build that in. Because, that is kind of – it’s a really new thing in regards to the length that WordPress has been around. Is there anything else that we didn’t cover today that you’d like to share about either AppPress or Reactor?

Scott: Sure, yes. So with Reactor, I just want to say, although Reactor doesn’t support a lot of plug-ins out of the box, we have hooks that you can use to support a lot of different things. So you can build a very simple custom plug-in that actually adds support for many different plug-ins.

So for example, we added a plug-in that supports the Blubrry PowerPress Podcast player. You can support the sermon manager plug-in to get like sermon managers – to get sermons in your app. If you have like a custom post [inaudible] [00:24:38] you can add custom post [inaudible] and all that kind of stuff to actually show up in the app. So it is possible to support custom plug-ins, it’s just a little bit of a different process.

Dustin: Awesome. Well, Scott, thanks so much for your time today, and if anyone is listening that has questions for you, or just wants to learn more about either of these platforms, how would be the best way to contact you?

Scott: AppPresser.com, I’m Scott at AppPresser.com, and we also have a contact form on the website – either way.

Dustin: Awesome. Well, thanks, Scott, for coming on and just explaining the two different platforms, and how we can take our WordPress website, wrap them up, and put them on an app so people can download them, and have them on their phones as they go. So I appreciate your time, thanks so much for coming on.

Scott: Thank you.

Dustin: All right, well, that is going to wrap up this episode, thanks Scott, so much, for coming on and spending some time today talking about the different options that we have to create a mobile website for our businesses, our blogs, our podcastings along those lines. I think that AppPresser is going to be what my method of implementation is going to be, so I’ll be spending the next couple of months trying to figure out learning the platform, and just designing a really cool application, and hopefully, I’ll have that really soon. That’s all I’ve got for you this week, take care, bye.