Convert Your WordPress Blog Into Native iOS App Using WiziApp

Have you thought of considering making a native iOS app for your blog ? Just imagine your own app in front of the biggest App store audience, huge visibility gains!

But how are you going to make it?

I know, it’s tough for anyone with zero development skills to make a mobile app on the most popular smartphone platform. However there are solutions. Either we can make some developer to make it for us or  use the various *free* RSS feed template apps available on the internet to make a hastily prepared half baked app. But we, or the audience never want half baked stuff, you will easily end up with bad ratings on the app store.

You don’t have to worry about all of that anymore, there is an easy and fast way to make your own native iOS app of your blog using just a wordpress plugin.

Are you baffled? I am, too. I had used these cumbersome free-to-use app template creators which grab the RSS feed of our blogs and makes apps out of it. I found those very bad in terms of quality as well as execution. But fear not, WiziApp plugin is here to help us. You can create an iOS app in just a few minutes, and I am going to take you through the whole process.

Before that, let’s watch a video explaining the plugin’s capabilities

Now, if you are having a self hosted wordpress blog, you MUST know how to install a plugin. A small recap for those of you who have selective amnesia –

1. Download the plugin to your PC ( Download Wiziapp plugin now )
2. Go to Plugins à Add new, on the wordpress dashboard
3. Click upload and select the zip file from your PC
4. Install and activate the plugin, you are good to go
5. You can find the plugin settings in a separate tab in the left sidebar of your dashboard

Once we are done with that, we have nothing else to do other than going to the plugin page from our wordpress dashboard. When we click WiziApp – it starts generating our app immediately. It takes several minutes, it actually scans your whole blog for necessary posts, categories, tags etc.

Once generated, we are greeted by t he minimal and beautifully designed settings page with three shortcuts/tabs, customize your app, choose your plan and publish to app store.

The first tab lets you customize the look and certain features. First setting is the Name of your app, I have created an example using my blog – bloggermint.com, so I am giving the name as Bloggermint. Every settings has a instant live preview of how it looks in your app.

Next setting let’s you design your splash screen either using a given choice from in built templates or upload your own. I found that the app will not support retina display resoluition because it asks for a 460×320 resolution for a custom splash screen. I had selected a template, looks like this –

You can customize your theme by selecting whichever things that are needed to appear in a post –

You can customize your bottom shortcut tabs too –

Most impressive feature you can enable in the app is push notifications! You can notify your readers when a new post is published. Options –

And, there are various sharing options from within every post or a page, the various sharing options you get in WiziApp are –

A neat set of sharing option I’d say.

And finally, if you have an admob account, you can include your ads in the app ! win for publishers !

After selecting these options, you can have a complete preview of the app in which you can browse the posts/pages and categories and see how the app will exactly look like. I found this very useful and exciting.

Posts look exactly how they should, the layout, the plugins, links, pictures, everything is preserved. Heck, even our adsense java script is supported. In short, you will not lose any wordpress plugin just because this is a mobile optimized page. Examples –

Post with really simple share plugin –

After you checked out your full app, you are then required to select the plans,

As you can see, there are three pricing options, you can select whichever suits your blog and then you are done, immediately published to the app  store. Let me explain the pricing.

You can see two price amounts in those three plans. First one is a per month payment, this is for the service they are providing, which includes the push notifications server and full fledged customer support with minimal downtime. The next one is the one time setup fee which you pay only once in the first month along with the service fee. Once you are done with your first payment, your app will be submitted to app store for verification of guidelines and eventually end up in the iTunes App Store ( most of the time ).

Why WiziApp ?

I know, after seeing the price, most of you would have started thinking twice/thrice or even n number of times before investing. Let me tell you why it is justified. As far as my experience goes, this is the only service that integrates with wordpress amazingly well. Plugins support, superb layouts ensure the high quality of the app. If you had noticed the screenshots keenly, the layout is similar or almost literally the same as what big blogs like Engadget have, in their iOS app. So, in order to achieve that amount of quality, it definitely demands a price.

Forget RSS templates if you own a WordPress blog, WizApp transforms the WordPress iPhone experience. To me this is one of the essential plugin to transform your WordPress blog into a native iPhone app. So why wait? Visit WiziApp and download the plugin right now.