WP-AppKit 0.6: Themes Galore

It’s always a pleasure to write the post announcing a new version of WP-AppKit. I tend to think it’s our very own small miracle to deliver several new versions per year. So, yes, version 0.6 is here 🙂 One of our main goals this year is to ease as much as possible theming in WP-AppKit and 0.6 helps a lot in that field.

Ready to see what’s new?

Themes Panel

For this version, we wanted to ease themes management and WP-AppKit has now a new Themes panel.

This panel lists installed themes as WordPress does.

You will be able to:

• search for a specific theme
• access theme’s details and check which applications currently use it
• add new themes

Pre-installed Starter Themes

It has been almost a year we have released the Wpak themes and we felt that we should provide better starter themes as WP-AppKit has changed a lot since. So let’s say goodbye to Wpak themes and meet Q for iOS and Q for Android, our new starter themes.

As you can see it’s a complete redesign.

• A clean and elegant design.
• Infinite lists. (WP-AppKit provides them since the beginning. It was a shame that starter themes didn’t implement them.)
• Nice and smooth transitions.
• iOS and Android native design (colors, spinners, transitions…). We particularly paid attention to Android and implemented material design (including ripple effects).
• As usual, starter themes make a good use of WP-AppKit features (eg. offline management).

Icing on the cake, starter themes are now pre-installed with WP-AppKit, you don’t need to install them anymore.

Deeplinks

After updating, you’ll maybe notice the new Deep Linking metabox in your application edit panel.

You can use it to define the hyperlinks to any screen in your app.

For example, you can have links like mygreatapp://single/posts/123 where mygreatapp is defined in the Custom URL Scheme field. (A very useful feature if you think of notifications.)

Shortcodes

With WP-AppKit, we’ve introduced shortcodes allowing to specify how content should appear in mobile apps. You can now specify that a piece of content:

• shouldn’t be displayed in apps (think of Flash based embeds or non responsive contents)
• shows only in apps (useful to provide alternate content for apps)

That is the main features of this new version but as usual there’s a list of additional fixes and enhancements. Be sure to check the changelog file.

We hope you’ll enjoy all this goodness and create great apps! 🙂