WordPress Tips

WordCamp Europe 2018 convened in Belgrade, Serbia over June 14-16, and progressive themes were a major trend discussed throughout the convention. NOYO Web Development takes a look at what four experts think regarding this significant trend.

What is a Progressive WordPress Theme

Simply put, a progressive WordPress theme is a theme designed to support progressive web apps (PWA). PWAs are apps that utilize modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like user experience. The apps meet specific requirements, are deployed to servers, are accessible through URLs, and indexed by search engines. Your PWA may be deployed as a native app as well to optimize both channels.

Elements of a Progressive Web App

To be considered a Progressive Web App, your app must be:

• Progressive – Work for every user, across any browser choice, and built with progressive enhancement as the core tenet.
• Responsive – Fit any form factor, mobile, desktop, tablet, or future technology.
• Connectivity independent – Enabled with service workers to operate on low quality networks or offline.
• App-like – Use the app-shell model to deliver app-style interaction and navigation.
• Fresh – Always up-to-date with the service worker update process.
• Safe – Served via HTTPS to protect content and prevent snooping.
• Discoverable – Are identifiable as “applications” according to W3C manifests and service worker registration scope.
• Re-engageable – Make re-engagement easy with factors such as push notifications.
• Installable – Allow users to “keep” apps they find most useful on their home screen without the hassle of an app store.
• Linkable – Easy to share via URL with no complex installation.

WordPress assembled a panel of four experts who are working to integrate progressive web technology more deeply into WordPress core, themes, and plugins. These best practices enable a website to work offline, deliver content across unreliable networks, load quickly, and use device specific features to create a superior user experience.

Morten Rand Hendriksen, Weston Ruter, Alberto Medina, and Thierry Muller joined the panel to discuss the future of WordPress themes with the advancement of progressive web development.

“At the most abstract level, it’s all about user experience,” Medina said. “How do we maximize the pleasure that our users get when they use our websites? And delightfulness in this context means things like performance, speed, having content that isn’t blocked. If you think about themes built according to those principles, then we are basically seeking an awesome user experience in WordPress.”

The WordPress progressive theme landscape is still developing, and experts generally agree that current solutions are not fully integrated. WordPress contributors are continuing to standardize progressive technologies in the core for better collaboration within the ecosystem.

“There are many progressive themes being built these days,” Medina said. “One of the problems that is happening is that there is a lot of fragmentation. There’s a lot of plugins that are using service workers but in their own ways. What we want is to say, ‘This is the best way to do things,’ this is a uniform API to do it, and then enable progressive theme developers to take advantage of the core functionality.”

Currently, regular users of WordPress may find that setting up a WordPress site that utilizes progressive web technologies may be a bit daunting, even with existing solutions.

“There’s also a user aspect of it, because the people for whom we design WordPress, plugins, and themes, are the people who actually publish their own content onto the web,” Rand-Hendriksen said. “There’s a really valid question in how much should they need to know about how the web works to be able to publish some content. When they spin up a WordPress site, should we impose on them to know that they need to add all these optimization plugins and do all this other stuff just to make the site work properly? How much of that can be offloaded onto the theme itself, or plugins, or even WordPress core?”

The four members of the WordPress panel are collaborating on core contributions and various projects that will culminate with the standardization of progressive enhancement technologies in WordPress. This will make the technology more available to non-expert users.

“The goal is to have a common API for service workers so that plugins and themes can each install their own logic, just like they can enqueue their own scripts today,” Ruter said. “Also to be able to enqueue their own service workers and then core can manage the combination of them, as well as having a common app manifest that plugins and themes can collaborate on and have a single output into the page.”

Organized by Rand-Hendriksen and his WP Rig starter theme project, the developers are seeking to harness the best practices quickly.

“WP Rig gives you the platform to build a progressive theme that uses all the latest performance and WordPress best practices, in a convenient package, and over time it will evolve with these new progressive technologies,” Rand-Hendriksen said.

The panel is also discussing Gutenberg and AMP compatibility, core support for web app manifests, and future reaction of the commercial theme industry towards the new technology.

Progressive web apps are the trend to stay on top of, and if you want to catch the wave early, contact NOYO Web Development. We are experts in trending WordPress technology with decades of experience with enterprise level organizations and SMEs. Contact us today for a free consultation.

Check out our last blog: WooCommerce Trends