Comments – they are the lifeblood of any great community-centric blog. Managing them, curating them, editing and spamming them is all a part of the process. As a result, choosing the best management system is very important.
That’s probably why I really enjoy using the WordPress apps on my iPhone and iPad and the feature highest on my list of “likes” is the comments. It’s way simpler to use than having to launch your site in your browser, possibly have to log in, navigate to Comments and then reply.
Now I do like the new addition of the comments in the WP Admin bar, but I’m not on my site or other WordPress sites all day, so I don’t always have visibility of it. Since I don’t leave my house or my desk without my iPhone, being able to open up the WordPress app and quickly reply to a comment is awesome. It’s a lot like how I use my iPhone and iPad more for replying to emails, sending text messages, tweets, and using Facebook. Something about that makes it feel more natural to me.
There are a couple other things that I like using the apps for too – one is publishing posts that are in draft. A more recent example of this is was my post about WordPress 3.5. I had a blog post ready to go, but wasn’t exactly sure when the new version was going to drop.
I obviously couldn’t schedule it, so it just sat there in my pocket (pun intended) ready to go once I got the email, tweet, or feed item. Once I got the notification, I opened up my iPhone, popped open the WordPress app, found my post, and flipped it from draft to published. It’s a lot easier to do something like that on my phone and I was out and about and didn’t have my laptop handy.
The other thing I’ll talk about is posting links and photos to my blog. One of the most recent releases of the app added the ability to change the Post Format.
Luckily my theme (Standard Theme) supports Post Formats, so I was able to take advantage. A lot of times I will find a link to another blog post or cool tech site and will want to share on my blog. All I have to do is long-press on the link, copy it to my clipboard, open the app, paste in the link, click the cog for the settings and change the post format to link.
The same can be true for posting photos. I can just choose an image from my camera roll, change the post format to Image and post it.
At this point it is one of the more complete apps available to online publishers and I’m liking it a lot. Are there any other apps that you use that provide as much value to me as the native iOS?
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