My role as Web Developer for iPhone Life keeps me focused mainly on what goes on behind the scenes. The software we use, Drupal, wins awards for its functionality, not for its user-friendliness. And when I work behind the scenes, I'm not using an iPhone or iPod touch to do it. So when one of our bloggers pointed out that she couldn't post from her iPhone, that was news to me. It seems Mobile Safari doesn't yet support enough JavaScript to run our Wysiwyg editor. While we wait for Apple to improve the browser, well, there's an app for that!
Now, there are probably several blogging apps that will work with Drupal -- as long as it supports the Blogger Data API, MetaWebLog API, or Movable Type API, it should be good to go. So there may be better apps than BlogPress. But I only have the time to review one, so I'm focusing one the one with native Drupal support.
Where BlogPress excels is the setup screen (above). Couldn't be easier. And as you can see, I can embed pictures direct from my iPod Touch. The photos can be uploaded to a complimentary BlogPress account (which I was not able to get working) or to a Picasa or Flickr account of your choice. My iPod doesn't have a camera, so I won't be testing the video upload capability (via YouTube), but it's there.
There are some limitations. BlogPress doesn't seem to support rich text (bold, italic, etc.) so in that respect I'm no better off than if I'd just disabled our site's rich text editor and posted in Safari. (this works, BTW.) Line breaks have a tendency to disappear -- I've gone back and added them from a desktop browser. Also, BlogPress doesn't support landscape mode, so you'd better have small fingers.
Then there's the matter of categories and tags. iPhone Life has a LOT of categories available to bloggers -- one for each app we've reviewed, for example. Navigating this list (above) is impractical, so bloggers will want to revisit their posts on a desktop computer to tag them properly. In BlogPress's defense, this is a limitation in the API, not in their app.
Finally, if you have the same username on multiple sites, you may have trouble telling them apart in the menus (above)! But all in all it's a very good option to have, and I'm glad to be able to recommend it, so I can disappear back behind the scenes! :-)
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
forgot to name the price
I forgot to mention that BlogPress costs $2.99 in the App Store. Enjoy!
default input format
A technical comment:
When posting a blog entry with pictures and videos in it, the pictures and videos may not show up initially on the Web site. They are there, they are just being filtered out. Here's why:
Drupal has an assortment of different "input formats" which apply various "filters" to the content before it is displayed. On the iphonelife.com site, and probably on most other sites, the default input format is pretty paranoid: it filters out anything that might be spam. Images that are hosted on other Web sites are suspicious because spammers use them, and so our default input format filters remote images out. To try to avoid that problem, our bloggers have their own default input format that is less paranoid. Unfortunately BlogPress doesn't recognize the users' default format and posts content in the site's default format, and the images are hidden.
Again, this is probably a limitation in the API and not in BlogPress per se. But the solution (for now) is to revisit your blog entry from a desktop computer and change the input format so that it is not filtered. During the CES expo, we may be able to do this for our bloggers to save them the trouble!
BlogPress and Drupal Input formats
Have you tried the Drupal module, "Better Formats"? I am curious if BlogPress would work better using the default Input format of those having the blogger role permissions (i.e. using Full HTML) on the Drupal site using this module or will still go to the site-wide default Input format of Drupal (i.e. Filtered HTML)?
Here is the link to the 'Better Formats' module on Drupal.org
http://drupal.org/project/better_formats
I was thinking of installing it to get around this issue, but if you are already using it (or have tried it) and it doesn't work, than there is no use me to installing it.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Louis