Advice about app-building

  • This is not an issue, but rather an opinion poll.

    I’m developing a nutrition app (web and native mobile) that needs to draw data via 3rd-party API, perform calculations on that data using user’s stored data, and display results in pretty pie charts.

    So far I have been building this from scratch using AppGyver, trying to copy the calculation logic from my original spreadsheet prototype. But I happen to run a blog using WP and have built this app’s landing page on it, so I’m more familiar with its workings. I’ve also noticed it seems more developed than AG and has a much more sophisticated look out of the box. I know there are several WP plugins that claim to wrap a WP site into a native mobile app, and other plugins that can add chart capability. In the future, I would ideally like the app to be able to do bar code scanning with a user’s phone camera, include optimization algorithms, and even use Python machine learning algorithms to learn user preferences from historical data. I haven’t seen a WP plugin for any of this…

    My question is: Is it possible and practical to build an app like this using the WP platform? So far I haven’t seen any way to perform calculations on data using WP. I do have some programming experience but I’m not a professional, so I want to avoid building the entire thing from scratch.

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  • I have built applications on WordPress that do this, so it certainly is possible.
    You can write your code in two different ways:
    – Create custom page templates in your theme, presumably a child theme.
    – Write a plugin that registers shortcodes. Reference these shortcodes in your pages / posts and your code creates the displays.

    One application is a genealogy wiki, subscribers input data about people in their family and connect to their relatives. Quite quickly the who ancestral village was covered, descendants around the world documented their family trees.
    Another application scored contests, judges input scores and comments against the entrants, administrators supervised the progress, at the end participants viewed their results and reports.

    There are also two different ways you can do the graphics (I have not done this very much):
    – html5, runs on your server
    – canvas: runs in javascript on the browser

    Be aware that you will need considerable proficiency in several computer languages. My systems use a mixture of:
    – PHP
    – HTML and CSS
    – SQL
    – javascript including AJAX

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by RossMitchell.

    WordPress has a REST API and you can ( and many do ) uses it as ‘headless’ i.e. you build an app that handles the front end and WordPress that handles the ‘back end’.

    It is also relatively easy with a small amount of PHP knowledge to build custom API Endpoints as required.

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