WordPress 2 for iPhone: loses some drafts, places pics at the bottom of posts
I’ve wanted to like the WordPress app for a long time, and the release of WordPress 2 really did get my hopes up. I don’t ever intend of writing a 2000-word review on my iPhone, but I enjoy being able to quickly share info about app releases and keep track of the blog regardless of where I am. WordPress 2 definitely hits the mark on quick, one-shot news posts and comments approval, but I’ve found it unreliable and strangely tedious for most everything else.
I’ll phrase my first problem as a question: why are pictures always added to the bottom of the post?
What’s wrong with the top? Most websites I visit feature a picture right at the top of the post. A third party iPhone app, Blogpress, can do this with ease and even handle in-line photo positioning, so why can’t the offiical, open-source app of a major blogging platform do it, too? One review from brighthub mentions that you can append pics wherever you want within a post, but I haven’t seen any way to do this except for the following:
- writing a post
- adding the picture
- saving the post as “pending review” so that it’s uploaded to your site
- going back into the post to edit it and manually moving the pic’s HTML code to the top
This might have been what the brighthub review meant, but I don’t really see that as a feature. It seems like a very clumsy workaround for something I should be able to do on-device before ever uploading anything.
Another thing is that the is just plain unstable. I’ve lost three drafts to the nether after specifically pressing the “save” button and going back to the main posts menu. I wrote one about a theme the other day as a local draft, pressed save, and then did some other work. I came back to the post a few minutes later to add to it, but all of the body text was gone, leaving only the title. This happened two more times when I tried uploading drafts to JAiB for safe-keeping.
What all three of these lost posts have in common is that I took a break in between writing and saving them (locally or online, doesn’t matter), so I can really only recommend WordPress 2 if you want to write a quick post and then upload it…with the picture at the bottom. Argh.
[by the way, if you do know why this is the case, please hit us up in the comments. I'd really like to know.]
I also had higher hopes for the WP2 app. Positioning the photos is something I was really after as well. I used WP1 when I was on holiday in Italy in March/April to do my entire holiday blog, and it was kinda workable but awkward – but the other apps were not do good back then – maybe they have improved since; back then I was on 2.2.1 as well so had no copy/paste so that made life "fun" – NOT.
I haven't used it much since and haven't had the drafts disappearing post situation you mentioned, will report back if I experience that once I've played with WP2 a bit more.
I hope they are listening to feedback and we see these things in future updates.
glad i'm not the only one who feels that way
yep – same experience with drafts and I still cant find how to actually ‘post’ what I have written. I’ll be giving it a miss for a while.
That one I can help you with: when you write a post tap in the "stauts" section and then set the status to "Published". Once you save it, it'll be published.
Yo, I'm the author of http://www.theneocell.com and I also am having this problem with WordPress 2. It's an unfortunate bug they haven't fixed yet.
Peace, JbB
Yeah, it's been a while now – you'd think they'd have some sort of quick update for it.