How To Build WordPress App with React Native Part #5: Home Screen

This series intends to show how I build an app to serve content from my WordPress blog by using react-native. Since my blog is talking about react-native, the series and the articles are interconnected. We will learn how to set-up many packages that make our lives comfortable and learn how to deal with WordPress APIs. Here, the most prominent features talked about in the book are the dark theme, offline mode, infinite scroll and many more. You can discover much more in this series. this inspiration to do this tutorial series came from the React Native App Templates from instamobile

Here, we are going to implement the overall UI for the Home Screen in the Home.js file. Here, we are going to simply fetch data from the WordPress API and display the data on the Home screen as

FlatList

. We are also going to make use of react-native-paper package using provides us with numerous useful components. But, first, we need to install the react-native-paper package as shown in the code snippet below:

yarn add react-native-paper

Then, we can link the package to our native platforms using the configuration that we learned before while installing other packages Then, we need to import the components from the react-native-paper as shown in the code snippet below:

 import {
      Avatar,
      Button,
      Card,
      Title,
      Paragraph,
      List,
      Headline,
    } from 'react-native-paper';

In render function, we are going to make use of the components from the
react-native-paper package in order to form a list template. For that, we need to use the code from the following code snippet:

  render() {
        return (
          <View>
            <Card
              style={{
                shadowOffset: {width: 5, height: 5},
                width: '90%',
                borderRadius: 12,
                alignSelf: 'center',
                marginBottom: 10,
              }}>
              <Card.Content>
              <Title>Blog post</Title>
                <Card.Cover
                  style={{
                    width: 350,
                    height: 190,
                    alignSelf: 'center',
                  }}
                  source={{
                    uri:
                      'https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1573921470445-8d99c48c879f?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&ixid=eyJhcHBfaWQiOjEyMDd9&auto=format&fit=crop&w=1050&q=80',
                  }}
                />
                <Paragraph>just a blog post</Paragraph>
              </Card.Content>
            </Card>
          </View>
        );
      }

Here, we made use of the Card component as parent component which wraps its sub-components. All the components have some styles integrated into them in order to make them look good.

Hence, we will get the following result in the emulator screen:

Fetching Post Data

Next, we are going to fetch the posts from the Wordpress API using the fetch() method. After fetching, we are going to parse the response into JSON format and configure it to the state called latestpost. The coding implementation is in the function called fetchLastestPost() whose overall configuration is provided in the code snippet below:

  componentDidMount() {
       this.fetchLastestPost();
     }
     async fetchLastestPost() {
       const response = await fetch(
         'https://kriss.io/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?per_page=5'
       );
       const post = await response.json();
       this.setState({ lastestpost: post});
     }

Here, we made an asynchronous call to the WordPress API from the function. Here, we have called the function in he componentDidMount function. Now, we also need to define the state called lastestpost as shown in the code snippet below:

   export default class Home extends React.Component {
      constructor(props) {
        super(props);
        this.state = {
          lastestpost: []
        };

The data from the request is shown in the screenshot below:

The data we are going to show in the template are highlighted using the red line.

Next, we are going to wrap the

Card

component with

FlatList

component and feed the API data into the

FlatList

. Then, the

Card

component template will be returned by the

FlatList

. But first, we need to import the

FlatList

component as shown in the code snippet below:

   import {View, Text, FlatList} from 'react-native';

Now, we are going to use the lastestpost state data into the

FlatList

as
shown in the code snippet below:

  <Headline style={{ marginLeft: 30 }}>Lastest Post</Headline>
            <FlatList
              data={this.state.lastestpost}
              renderItem={({ item }) => (
                  <Card
                    style={{
                      shadowOffset: { width: 5, height: 5 },
                      width: '90%',
                      borderRadius: 12,
                      alignSelf: 'center',
                      marginBottom: 10,
                    }}>
                    <Card.Content>
                      <Title>{item.title.rendered}</Title>
                    </Card.Content>
                    <Card.Cover
                      source={{ uri: item.jetpack_featured_media_url }}
                    />
                  </Card>
              )}
              keyExtractor={item => item.id}
            />

Hence, we will get the following result in our emulator screens:

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to implement the overall UI of the Home screen tab using the react-native-paper package. We also learned how to fetch the data from the WordPress server using the fetch method.