During five days of hiking in Yosemite I was without a cellphone connection most of the time. (the only connection available to me was the [overloaded, overcrowded] motel WiFi, at night. Sometimes even that would fail because too many people tried to use it.)
I tried to blog some of my cellphone photos and thoughts more or less "live" but the WordPress mobile app made that not exactly easy. Some of the problems that I encountered include:
- images do not get "attached" to the post in which they're used - they end up "stray" in the Media Library. Having some old drafts (from when I imported my old Blogger blog to WordPress) I made it a habit to delete unattached images after I clean up/post old drafts (and replace images with newer versions). If I'm not careful, I'll nuke the photos that I posted on the go with the mobile app (guess how I learned that).
- There is no way to enter/edit image title, caption, alt-tag, description.
- there's no way to insert a "more" tag - it's essential to column/masonry based theme layouts like the ones I prefer, and I prefer it to show post snippets over using separate excerpts. I ended up manually entering them in the HTML editor - so much joy on the phone screen...
- the sidebar with the post options is rather awkward to navigate with the touch interface. Maybe that's easier on an iPad screen, but on the normal iPhone 6 screen it's difficult. Don't want to think about iPhone 5, or even 4!
- no auto-complete for your tags to make sure you use the correct, existing tags and don't create duplicates (was it "cellphone" now, or "cellphone photo"? - of COURSE I get it wrong)
- and the worst: there is no "local" mode to store drafts locally when you're writing without a network connection - absolutely fantastic to find out after you wrote two paragraphs with the phone's touch-keyboard! I lost these two paragraphs - there is no freaking way to save what you've written when you don't have a connection. Seriously? Major bummer.
Maybe all this is good enough for the occasional blogger, but WordPress is a feature-rich platform, I appreciate it for that, and I'd like to utilize these features.
As a WordPress user for >3 years now who has gained some insight into the workings of the platform, and with certain expectations to the aesthetics and design of my posts, this whole experience left me disappointed. Essentially, I'd have to retouch every post created with the app on the desktop later, with a normal browser, to fix the shortcomings of the app.
I hope the feedback is helpful.
Alexander.
