I would like my iPhone app to get dynamic content off the net. This content should be managed using a CMS. I would like to know in particular if I can setup Drupal or Joomla or other CMS as a backend for my iphone app to get the content.
Any advice on how this can be achieved would be helpful.
I am completely new to setting up/using CMS.
You can also take a look at StorageRoom, which is a CMS for Mobile Applications.
Disclaimer: I created this myself to scratch my own itch.
Wordpress with the JSON-API plugin is a great solution, especially if you need a web site as well.
You can find a good example here that uses Wordpress and Phonegap to get a basic app going.
If you can access the content in any serialized format (e.g. XML or JSON), it should be no problem to use any CMS as a "backend" for your application.
I'm checking out storageroom, and I'm searching for a similar answer, but I also found osmek to be a bit promising. I might use that one because of the menu templates .Osmek can provide responses in json and xml (and other formats that aren't useful in iphone dev like php, html, and templates)
Feed.Us is another option. I have a series of travel guides iphone apps and use Feed.Us to manage the businesses listed within the apps.
It creates a URL with XML that gets imported into the app.
This seems to be a very promising solution!
Apache Usergrid
I have briefly tried DreamFactory for some trial project but never got around to using it in production. Usergrid seems to be in the right direction in providing a full fledged solution (which can also work for modern web apps)
I'm very curious about Helios (helios.io) and will be trying it out shortly.
At least from the write-up on their site it looks very promising. Its open source, and in beta currently. They also have very easy heroku hosting support.
Helios is an open-source framework that provides essential backend
services for iOS apps, from data synchronization and push
notifications to in-app purchases and passbook integration.
I will update the answer again once I use this for some test project.
you can use any cms or framework to implement this. you need to make a jsonm api to communicate between app and backend server.
For php cms joomla, drupal and wordpress are best.
in frameworks you can use yii, cakephp, laravel or zend
hope this helps..
Also worth taking a look at Cloud CMS:
http://www.cloudcms.com
It's a cloud content management system for mobile and web applications, entirely oriented around JSON and having a fast, fully featured API. Your iOS application could easily grab things, render them, capture data, store it back into the CMS and more. Plus, it gives you a user interface you can drop in front of your business users so that they can create, edit and review things.
Note: I'm one of the developers. That said, worth checking out if for no other reason than for inspiration.
Depending on the data-complexity, perhaps willing a CMS into being a data-store or simple API is overkill when you can leverage file storage services like Google Drive/Apps to GET/POST spreadsheets or other documents in JSON, among other formats.
Is it possible to use Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive, etc. as a server space?
Related
I learned how to code in swift a little while back and created my first app. Now I'm trying to market it to customers, I realized that a web-interface might be what I need to scale this up to start attracting clients.
I use firebase as my backend now and would like to see what I can do to have a web interface that:
Allows customers to log in to see their unique data.
Updates info on my firebase backend
is Scaleable.
I'm not sure where to start nor how long this process will take. Any one has any ideas on where to get started?
I'm pretty sure Wordpress has a firebase plugin that could come in handy. Using Wordpress would save a lot of time actually designing a website, getting servers, and backend stuff like that. If you pay a little bit you can get rid of the .wordpress. com tag too, and your website can easily look professional.
Firebase is a realtime database and it is mostly used with mobile apps and some of the JavaScript applications like Angular and ReactJS. I think the best is to use ReactJS and there you can do a lot of the same functionalities you did on your app.
You can find a lot of tutorials online about how to do reactjs and firebase apps.
Have a look at this post and it should give you an idea about how it is done. It is gonna be a new thing if you are not familiar with javascript NodeJS / ReactJS development. (Firebase, react and redux wait for store to update)
For an iOS App I am looking for a BaaS provider. From a developers view StackMob is quite interesting, but I am missing a nice (web-)frontend to add and edit stored objects. The "Data Management" option in the Dashboard is unsuitable for non-technical people.
Is there a nice (free or paid) frontend for content management on StackMob?
I don't know of any prebuilt CMS frontend for StackMob. However, what most of our customers looking for something like that use is the HTML5 offering we have. That allows you to create a custom HTML5 app of the StackMob content that is completely your brand. It isn't as easy as the prebuilt option, but it does provide you with a lot of flexibility.
Ty
I have created an iphone app which basically pulls json feeds into my iphone..I have created the JSON file manually and put the jSON file in My FTP Server..as far as updation are concered the client gives me the updation via email or skype which i then update my JSON file that is in the server.what i want to develop is a Backened CMS so that the client is able to handle the maintanenece.i m a noob as far CMS is concerned,which is the best place to start..is wordpress a better..Any advice on how this can be achived would be helpful
Appnx has a pretty neat backend.
iPhone-CMS uses TYPO3 as the backend and can generate native apps.
Please take a look at our JSON-based StorageRoom CMS. We built many mobile apps ourselves and always had the content problem, so one day we created our own CMS.
I am looking to build software that has an Iphone application as well as a Wordpress based website. Essentially the user will enter data into the iphone app that will then be relayed to the Wordpress site and displayed in various manners.
Whats the best way to get the iphone database and CMS database to communicate?
Thanks
This might go without saying, but generally speaking I would try to keep your client (iPhone) app as 'dumb' as possible; Your Wordpress DB should really own all of the content, and the data stored on the iPhone should be as temporal as possible. To put it another way, your app should be like a WP theme. A theme doesn't really 'know' about the WP database - it's just responsible for displaying it (and occasionally adding to it with things like comment forms).
Anyway, as for the actual communication I would recommend keeping as much in JSON as possible (I've found it easier than XML). There's a great plug-in for Wordpress that can help you out, that exposes WP functionality in a JSON-based API: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/json-api/
As for working with JSON on the phone itself, I highly recommend the json-framework: http://code.google.com/p/json-framework/ . In short, it'll convert a JSON string into an NSDictionary in one method. Incredibly useful.
Good luck!
May be it's too obvious, but usually for database communicaton used XML, CSV, JSON etc.
We have our clients website in Drupal at present, for which we needs to create an iPhone App.
So any ideas on how to do that?
Is there any ready made available plug-ins or modules which we can use to generate Category / Articles XMLs directly from database, without much custom code n its headache?
All your suggestions are most welcome..
Thanks !
Yes. You should start with "Services" module, which will allow you to communicate your website with external websites or applications.
Also, you will need a way to communicate with Drupal. We're using XMLRPC, but you can use JSON, Rest...up to you.
Here you have an starting point: http://www.zivtech.com/blog/simplest-drupal-iphone-app
Services implements the most common used methods for Drupal. Which are node saving/load, comments and users. If you need extra functionality, you will need to create a custom module (rather easy).
You can test all the calls with the Services tab in the Drupal website. Just remember to set the permissions.
There is also a Drupal-iOS SDK, which does almost everything I told you, but uses plist instead. https://github.com/seanhellwig/drupal-ios-sdk