WordPress feature plugin to bring Progressive Web App (PWA) capabilities to Core
Contributors: google, xwp, westonruter, albertomedina
Tags: pwa, progressive web apps, service workers, web app manifest, https
Requires at least: 5.3
Tested up to: 5.5
Stable tag: 0.5.0
License: GPLv2 or later
Requires PHP: 5.6
Progressive Web Apps are user experiences that have the reach of the web, and are:
- Reliable - Load instantly and never show the downasaur, even in uncertain network conditions.
- Fast - Respond quickly to user interactions with silky smooth animations and no janky scrolling.
- Engaging - Feel like a natural app on the device, with an immersive user experience.
This new level of quality allows Progressive Web Apps to earn a place on the user's home screen.
Continue reading more about Progressive Web Apps (PWA) from Google.
In general a PWA depends on the following technologies to be available:
This plugin serves as a place to implement support for these in WordPress with the intention of being proposed for core merge, piece by piece.
This feature plugin is not intended to obsolete the other plugins and themes which turn WordPress sites into PWAs. Rather, this plugin is intended to provide the PWA building blocks and coordination mechanism for these themes and plugins to not reinvent the wheel and also to not conflict with each other. For example, a theme that implements the app shell model should be able to extend the core service worker while a plugin that provides push notifications should be able to do the same. Themes and plugins no longer should have to each create a service worker on their own, something which is inherently problematic because only one service worker can be active at a time: only one service worker can win. If you are developing a plugin or theme that includes a service worker, consider relying on this PWA plugin, or at least only use the built-in implementation as a fallback for when the PWA plugin is not available.
Documentation for the plugin can be found on the GitHub project Wiki.
Development of this plugin is done on GitHub. Pull requests welcome. Please see issues reported there before going to the plugin forum.
Please see the frequently asked questions on the GitHub project wiki. Don't see an answer to your question? Please search the support forum to see if someone has asked your question. Otherwise, please open a new support topic.
For the plugin’s changelog, please see the Releases page on GitHub.