One of the better iPad tools for Blogger and WordPress users is now free, and just as good as when it first hit the App Store. For WordPress especially, it’s a rare case of an app capable of handling many custom sites as easily as a default installation, including custom posts, pages, templates and custom post formats – though unfortunately not outright custom post types.
Posts can also handle multiple blogs at once, and syncs with your sites to work offline as well as when there’s a net connection. It doesn’t try to replace your actual admin screens, but has more than enough power to keep sites updated while away from your PC/Mac.
That said, it’s missing support for some odd things, and in terms of power, is lacking compared to some of the paid competition – most notably Blogsy, with its handy features like Markdown and integrated access to sites like Flickr. If you’ve already paid for that app or another heavy hitter, you’re unlikely to switch. If not though, Posts’ free price makes it well worth a try, and it is, mostly, a more comfortable editor than the official WordPress app.
On both sides, that’s thanks to an excellent WYSIWYG editor that handles the majority of site formatting, and a bare-bones plain text one that turns everything into a HTML mulch. On a WordPress blog, both provide access to most of the options that matter, including custom fields, categories (standard taxonomy only), tags and excerpts/ read more links. In rich-editing mode, one-tap buttons handle fonts and justification. Plain-text editing assumes you know how to do that, but includes basic bold, italic, strikethrough and a button for creating divs on the fly.
Both allow direct image insertion, defaulting to full size. Unfortunately missing in action is the ability to set default sizes or draw from ones set up in WordPress. Simply insert one from your Photo Gallery without remembering both to set the size (and what that size is!), and it’ll blow right through the template.
WordPress galleries are also unsupported, and of course there’s no way to access the Media Library, or more irritatingly, pull images from anything but Photos. It is, however, possible to copy and paste images between articles. It can’t handle WordPress image captions at all, only tooltips, alt text, or image thumbnails. Once posted, entries are attractively displayed, with the first image giving a visual preview to go with the title and post-date.
Posts are displayed on a timeline, with each post also offering at-a-tap access to linked comments where you can also add your own responses, approve or unapprove, and mark a post as read so that its comments aren’t flagged up. Posts on our test site were almost all easily enough edited, the exceptions being a couple with embedded YouTube movies that led to a forced-quit and restarting.
Pages work exactly the same, minus the timeline view, but also with the handy picture. In another odd omission though, there’s no support for page hierarchies at all. This kind of feature being MIA unfortunately keeps Posts pipped to the erm, post, and – as ever – the more complex your site, the less useful it’s going to be. As an example, there’s no way to preview a post in your actual site template rather than on a white screen (which wouldn’t be as big a deal if it wasn’t so happy to upload huge images instead of resizing them).
Provided that you primarily work with posts and pages and know your image sizes though, it does do everything that you’re likely to need for blogging on the move and editing user comments in a more iPad friendly way than at least the WordPress app. For free, that’s at least worth checking out.
Key info
- Works with: iPad
- Price: Free
- Developer: Pico
- Version: 1.1
- App size: 7.3MB
- Age rating: 4+
