WordPress as a 'web app'

  • i’m not even sure if web app would be the right term… & this is for conversation’s sake neway.

    i love building with WP – but the interwebs are charging along and altho there are some great things goin on (the front end editor for example) there’s some stuff i find hard to do with it.

    specifically some interaction standards happening out there – like swipes with animations to more content.

    check here for an example from google of the types of interaction i’m talking about.

    i know it’s not really wordpress’ place to make the transitions and stuff happen. that’s what css and jquery’s for – right? but then you have to bring ajax into the equation too – to load, say, the next page from the database.

    is there an easier way to produce and load page transitions like this?

    i’m not looking to learn node.js. you know? just looking to open a conversation. BUT if anyone has any killer tips then please share!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • Well, you definitely don’t need node.js to do any of this. It is certainly all within the capacity of what WordPress already has. However, yes, this would be a fairly ajax heavy implementation, which WordPress is not typically about.

    Are you looking to make something yourself or find a theme? There might be themes that already do some of this ajax-y stuff you are looking for.

    For example, look at this theme: https://www.spab-rice.com/themeselector/?theme=coco

    It’s definitely all about the ajax and probably making a few custom responses in php that return you JUST the new content you need to replace part of the page with. Then you’d write some javascript/css3 animations to make it come in nicely.

    Thread Starter venkmanuk

    (@venkmanuk)

    hello!

    yeah i was thinking in terms of custom build.

    that one you liked is interesting – it looks like objects are loaded off screen and then animated in once they’ve loaded? but the url switches immediately. pretty cool!

    besides knowing how exactly to do it, the visual problem is we’re left with that spinner.

    there are some sites using a kind of greyed out placeholder content instead of spinners. facebook for one… it sort of fakes a faster load time.

    That’s mostly just a demonstration of wordpress doing everything you are talking about. I’m actually not a huge fan of the theme, haha. I find it a bit overdone. But yeah, that’s ajax at play, which is what gives you the fancy url changing before loading.

    You could definitely do something that loads up placeholder boxes and then populates each individually but that’s a bit more complex. In one case, you could settle for a response that just returned HTML, to individually populate cells you’d want to work in JSON responses instead.

    WordPress is coming out with a JSON API, which is good news, though I don’t know much about how to use it, and I don’t think its released yet either.

    Thread Starter venkmanuk

    (@venkmanuk)

    oh really?

    hmm, might be a cue to go and learn some JSON!

    i’d love it to be a little less (hacky) to get the kind of interactions we’re talking about. like a library of interactions that do animations for page load. something else to work on i guess!

    We used pjax on WooThemes.com to gracefully handle ajax and browser history. Its really to simple to setup. Hope that helps.

    Thread Starter venkmanuk

    (@venkmanuk)

    looks interesting / useful warren, thanks. i’ll try that out.

    on your website it’s not too obvious where you have pjax implemented but i think i found it. it’s used in the on topic theme..

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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