WordPress iPad Application Review

I have been using the WordPress iPad application for a few weeks lately and finally have a chance to write and post my review of the application and what there is to like and dislike about using the WordPress iPad application to blog.

The iPad WordPress application does have some trimmed features that allow you to connect to multiple blogs so that you can review, approve and respond to comments right from the main screen.  This is pretty useful if you want to engage and respond to your readers quickly and doing comment responses on an iPad is far better than any mobile phone for sure.

The WordPress iPad application does not support any plugins however and utilizing features like my Ajax Edit Comments are not possible from this application.

The WordPress iPad application also gives you no access to your Dashboard so anything you have showing or need access go isn’t going to be available.  The iPad WordPress app is primarily only designed to manage comments and write/post articles to your sites.

The WordPress iPad application does allow you to set details for posts like publishing dates, status, visibility as well as add tags, description and Title.

Writing articles I found to be challenging for several reasons and not all are related to the WordPress app.  The auto-correction feature of iOS can seriously interfere with a tech bloggers articles and this had to be turned off to make writing articles less frustrating.  The WordPress iPad application has the advantage of letting you live post to your blog as well as upload images or video right within your blog post, however the limitations on formatting, where you can put images, no setting featured images or lack of access to any plugins like All in One SEO pack mean that most bloggers will likely just write drafts and save them to be modified from the WordPress dashboard later.

The WordPress iPad application does have a really good preview feature which I thought was one of it’s strongest features.  So you can quickly and easily see how your article will look when published.

Then there is the major editing bug that I found in the WordPress iPad application that once discovered ended my use of the application going forward.  This bug is when you want to try and type a paragraph or sentence above or prior to your latest paragraph the WordPress application for the iPad will jump your cursor to the very bottom after striking a single letter.  This makes it impossible to do insertions of content above content and is a show stopping bug for me.

The WordPress iPad application also does not allow users with “contributor” accounts to connect and publish/schedule as XML-RPC remote, yet Live Writer allows this access as well as some other applications.  It should support contributors and not require an admin account to allow access.  (I didn’t check default author accounts).

Probably the most disappointing is the lack of control you have when uploading images into your WordPress posts.  It has image upload capability which is nice but you lack the ability to do placement, styling or any sort of control over the images.  This means in most cases I would end up just re-inserting the image in the post through the WordPress dashboard anyway.

In Summary

The WordPress iPad application is useful though the editing existing paragraphs bug makes it almost unusable though I don’t know if everyone experiences this bug.  I do like that it can save your articles as drafts on the site and that you can reply to comments easily.  I did decide to switch to using the Evernote for iPad application for writing draft posts ahead of time though still lacks the ability to use formatting for text and I don’t like that the tags aren’t comma delimited and you lack a word count for your articles.  If you have Internet access then writing articles in the WordPress admin through Safari or web browser is far more preferable to using the WordPress iPad application, though it may help with drafting some posts for editing later from your iPad.

-Dragon Blogger