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Below is a list, in no particular order, of things that Wordpress theme designers should consider before they release their precious little CSS and Photoshop fueled butterfly onto the Wordpress theme database:

1. Don’t put the categories in a menu bar across the top of the theme. A lot of us have a lot of categories, and even the more code-savvy amongst us are likely to junk your theme out of hand.
2. I am more than happy to have an unobtrusive link to your site in my footer. I am not more than happy to have that footer loaded with spam links to your ad affiliates that break the theme when I remove them.
3. Please make sure that the little things like properly centered images and italics and bold text work in your theme.
4. An editable .PSD file with the theme’s header will likely save both of us a lot of time.
5. Stick to the basics. If you get clever with your theme and it requires sifting through fifty-billion lines of PHP to figure out how you did what you did then there’s a good chance the theme is going to break in some future Wordpress update.
6. I would gladly pay a reasonable amount of money for your theme if it was pure awesome and addressed these irritating issues.

Do you write or develop using Wordpress? I know you can’t complain that much when it comes to getting something for free, but there are some basic mistakes that people seem to make over and over. What are some common annoyances you’ve noticed?

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Most of you are reading this via your favorite RSS reader and probably haven’t noticed some of the changes that I’ve been making to the site over the past few days. Those of you who visit the site in your browser rather than your RSS reader have noticed and commented on how schizophrenic the site’s look has been in the past month. You have my apologies for all the seemingly random changes as I’ve been running into problems testing out various Wordpress themes.

The trouble started when I noticed that images weren’t uploading properly in the Mandigo theme from Wordpress for iPhone. For most writers that probably wouldn’t have been a deal breaker, but I tend to do a lot of my first drafts on the iPhone. I like to know that I have the ability to make a post on the fly even if I don’t do it that often since tapping out HTML on the iPhone keyboard is cumbersome.

The problem boiled down to the Mandigo designers using a few too many PHP tricks which led to the theme having a fit every time it saw raw HTML coming through. There’s a lesson in that for Wordpress theme designers. Stick with CSS and the existing framework and try not to get too clever. Otherwise you’re liable to just set your theme up for an inevitable theme break in a future Wordpress update.

The second issue I ran into was themes that hard coded spam into their footers. So this is a word of warning to Wordpress users who see a wonderful theme that has links to some distinctly spammy sites in the footer. There’s a reason that they’re giving away that flashy looking theme for free. You’re helping to inflate their pagerank and possibly opening up your users to a malicious attack if you get a theme from somewhere other than the official Wordpress theme page.

I also found that a lot of themes just had some silly little problems. Some decided to put the categories in a navigation bar across the top which is a deal breaker if your blog has more categories than can fit nicely in that small real estate. It’s a simple matter to comment that out, but more trouble than I’m willing to go to for a theme that I don’t love.

Other problems were smaller, like the Black Splat theme that I’ve been using for the past week having an issue with centering images in posts. Old fashioned HTML, putting the image in a centered div, using the Wordpress WYSIWYG editor, nothing would get an image to stay centered. That bug took a few days to notice since the center column was so narrow and most images I was posting were about the same size as the column. Sometimes it’s the little errors that can drive you the most insane.

So now I’m trying out Arjuna. We’ll see how it goes and if any little issues crop up with this one. I suppose you can’t complain too much when you’re getting something for free, but I hope that my little Wordpress theme adventure will at least provide some helpful advice to anyone else doing a similar search in the future.

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Wordpress 2.2 for iPhone has been more stable than its predecessors so far, but I have come across a minor bug that could potentially turn into a major annoyance depending on how often you save.

The app has a “feature” that kicks you out of whatever you’re working on when you hit the save button. This is annoying enough in and of itself, necessitating thumbing back into whatever you were working on each time you save, but the 2.2 release has added another helpful save feature that occasionally deletes whatever you worked on between your last two saves.

So if you tend to save every few sentences it’s not a huge issue. But it can really suck when you forget about the bug after writing a long post and lose everything you’ve been thumbing out for the past hour.

There’s a simple workaround for the problem. Just Select All and Copy whatever you’re working on before saving and then go back into the article and make sure that everything saved properly. If it didn’t then you just have to Paste, save, and repeat until the app decides to cooperate.

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This is slightly old news, but there have been a couple of Wordpress updates that came down the pipeline over the holidays.

Wordpress 2.9.1 hit last week and fixes a few bugs, most notably an issue with scheduling posts that annoyed me a few times by backdating articles to the ’60s. You can download the fix from the Wordpress site, but why would you do that since they added the wonderful one click update from the backend?

There’s also a 2.0 (2.1 now) version of Wordpress for iPhone available on the app store. I mention this because I’d been waiting for a fix to the old version of the app without realizing that they were releasing a completely new one with a different download link. I’ve been using it for a dew days now with no major issues, though it would be nice if the switch to the 2.0 version had somehow been noted as an update for 1.0 users.

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Wordpress 2.1 for the iPhone is out and it comes with an undocumented but potentially quite annoying bug.

Two days ago I noticed that there was an update for Wordpress on the app store and downloaded it.  As it was loading I was thinking about how wonderful the 2.0 update had been in terms of adding stability and making the app crash-free.  A nagging voice in the back of my head was reminding me of the Blizzard Authenticator update issues and wondering why we should upgrade to a new version if nothing was broken in the current version.  The API changes that they made with 2.1 might be nice for some people, but it certainly wasn’t a pressing issue for me.

I downloaded it anyways, still riding high on a wave of good feelings from the 2.0 update and forgetting all of the issues that plagued earlier versions of the app.

Yesterday I fired it up to post a Local Draft of an old article that I’d thumbed in.  Imagine my annoyance when I set the status to Published, hit the Save button, and watched my wonderful post disappear into the series of tubes never to be seen again.  I checked in all the various Wordpress folders on my iPhone.  I logged onto the site itself to make sure that it hadn’t posted anyways and just wasn’t showing up in the iPhone interface.  Ten minutes of searching later it became clear that the post was gone forever.

This was more than annoying, so I set about testing it to see if I could duplicate the issue.  I started by making a completely new test post that had only seen the current 2.1 version of the iPhone Wordpress app.  The test post went through and posted to the site just fine.  I then went back to an older draft that I’d written in version 2.0, copied and pasted the text just to be sure I wouldn’t lose it, and tried posting it to the site.  It promptly suffered from a Sudden Massive Existence Failure and disappeared.  I then created a new post, copied and pasted the text from the post that had just disappeared, saved it as a published document, and it promptly appeared on the website.

So it appears that Wordpress 2.1 for the iPhone comes with an undocumented feature where it eats Local Drafts of posts that were created before upgrading in version 2.0 of the app.  A workaround exists in that you can simply copy the text of the old draft created with version 2.0, copy it into a new post created with version 2.1, and then post from there.

So use the workaround, downgrade to 2.0 if you have the ability to do so, or simply sit back and wait for the next update as the changes from 2.0 to 2.1 are mostly cosmetic anyways.

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Since the 3.0 update hit the iPhone in mid-June bringing copy and paste to the platform I’ve finally been able to use my phone as a standalone blogging platform rather than a useful tool for uploading drafts to be edited on a desktop later. The only problem was that the Wirdpress for iPhone app, a buggy an inconsistently reliable program to begin with, was completely broken by the 3.0 upgrade. The dev team promised that an update was on the way, but in the meantime I decided to try out one of the other options on offer at the iPhone app store.

Any Port in a Storm

I decided to go with Blogpress based on the mostly favorable reviews in the app store.  What I found was an excellent little blogging platform that was remarkably bug free with only a few functionality issues when compare to the Wordpress app. The first concern was stability.   The last two versions of the Wordpress app had a tendency to crash occasionally or, more often, eat posts. This never became an issue with Blogpress.

Trying Out the Basics

Logging in was as simple as typing in my username and password and Blogpress was ready to go. Wordpress mobile requires XML-RPC to be enabled from the web control panel before it can connect. I’m not sure if the same holds true for Blogpress since I already had the feature enabled, but it’s something to keep in mind when using the program for the first time. The app supports HTML formatting within posts, meaning that you’ll have to brush up if you’ve gotten used to the Wordpress text editor. One function that is conspicuously absent from Blogpress is the ability to create and edit Wordpress pages. How much that matters depends entirely on how you blog and if you use pages at all, but for me it is definitely a sorely missed feature.

Basic functions such as adding tags or categories to a post performed without any trouble in Blogpress. All is not perfect, however, in the tags and categories department. Blogpress lacks the functionality to add new categories directly from the app. This isn’t a deal-breaker as it is still possible to simply make new categories in Safari and then refresh the list in Blogpress, but it is a convenience that I missed after bein able to add categories within the Wordpress app, even if that action wa likely to cause Wordpress to crash or eat a post. The second issue I found was that tags tended to disappear if you added them to a post and then edited the categories for that post. This was another minor problem as it just meant adding the tags again, but it remains an annoyance regardless.

Issues and Bugs

The biggest non-bug related issue I found was how Blogpress handled image insertion. The program offers an intuitive interface for adding photos and specifying alignment and text wrapping, and the images upload into Wordpress with no issues. The problem is that any image uploaded from your phone is sent to a shared image database hosted by Blogpress rather than to your own webspace. They also provide an option to upload to a private Picasa album, but that still leaves images reliant on a third party provider. An option for uploading to a folder wherever the blog is hosted would be nice, but in the meantime I’ll rely on HTML and FTP On the Go for inserting images into a post.

One final minor issue involve post-dated posting. Blogpress dates all posts from the time you started drafting it rather than when you post it, an annoying “feature” that also shows up in the Wordpress mobile app. And for some reason setting a post for a later time or date on the phone results in the post being scheduled 4-5 hours before or after that scheduled time when it hits server side. I tried tinkering with time and date settings from my web control panel after finding nothing that controls time and date in the Blogpress controls, but this issue rests squarely with Blogpress as far as I can tell. So be warned that any posting will require some tinkering from the control panel before being published i you want to get the time and date correct.

Is it Worth $2.99?

Despite these issues, Blogpress does provide a stable and reliable alternative for Wordpress users. The program was refreshingly crash-free, and for now the bar set by the Wordpress mobile app has been so low that something as basic as stability is enough to set Blogpress apart for now. The real question is whether or not stability alone is worth the $2.99 pricetag considering all the other non-crash related issues that come bundled with Blogpress. When I first bought the app two weeks ago as the only iPhone blogging alternative while the Wordpress app was being updated for 3.0 I would have said it’s definitely worth the pocket change. Any port in a storm and all that. Now that Wordpress Mobile 3.0 is out and appears to be finally bring all the functionality of a mobile Wordpress control panel with stability for free I’m more inclined to say bloggers are better off stickin with the free app. Blogpress might still be a viable blogging option for the other blogging platforms it supports, but at the moment its an emergency backup at best for Wordpress bloggers.

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The long awaited iPhone 3.0 update for Wordpress has finally hit the app store after taking roughly two weeks to be approved by the good people at Apple. I imagine there was a glut of apps submitted for approval in the runup to 3.0 that accounts for the delay on Apple’s part, but this situation did make me slightly nostalgic for Windows mobile where an application can be downloaded directly from the programmer the day it’s ready.

I’ve just made a test post from the new Wordpress app, and after that brief use it seems like they’ve fixed a good chunk of the issues that I complained about in my earlier post on the topic. I’ll have a more detailed analysis in the next few days after I’ve had more time to play with it.

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An addendum to my earlier entry. It now appears that the Wordpress app for iPhone has gone from mostly broken to completely broken with the iPhone 3.0 update.  Categories no longer show up, for starters, and I’m not even going to bother trying to use it long enough to find out what other new and wonderful bugs have been introduced to an app that was already more buggy than an ant colony at a sugar convention. Will someone please make a stable Wordpress compatible iPhone 3.0 app that supports linking and categories? Have I mentioned that I’d gladly part with a reasonable chunk of money for this tool?

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A screenshot of the Wordpress iPhone app in action.

The addition of copy and paste to the iPhone with version 3.0 corrects a mobile computing oversight of Newtonian proportions on Apple’s part and brings the popular smartphone one step closer to being the perfect mobile blogging platform, but it still isn’t quite there yet.

The biggest problem with writing from the iPhone in the past was linking.  Including links directly to sources is the foundation that blogging is built upon, and removing that functionality simply because there was no easy way to copy links into a post meant that the iPhone was limited in its blogging scope.

Now those issues are almost a thing of the past.  I say almost because copy and paste was only one part of the mobile blogging equation.  The rest of the problem now lies with Wordpress and their mobile app, which is something of a necessity since the Wordpress control panel is one of the few sites I’ve come across that Safari Mobile renders with less than perfect fidelity.

Stability is still the major issue for the Wordpress Mobile app.  Random crashes and a Save button that has an irritating habit of disappearing every time you add a new category to a post or look at your iPhone funny are the rule rather than the exception at the moment, though with the advent of copy and paste its easy enough to write a draft of your post in a stable environment isn’t going to arbitrarily eat your post like the built-in Notes app and then copy the text over to Wordpress when you’re ready to publish your draft.  Still, the workaround is a less-than-ideal solution.

I don’t feel like I can complain too much since the Wordpress app provides mostly excellent functionality for free, but I will say that I would gladly pay a premium price for a stable blogging app that provides the same functionality as the free version.  I’m sure I’m not the only blogger out there with a lot of frustration and a little bit of disposable income who feels the same way.  Just sayin’, Wordpress Mobile devs.

Additionally there is currently no support for inserting a link into a post, though this is hardly something I can fault the developers for since there was no easy way to copy links until two days ago thanks to Apple’s oversight.  Again there is a workaround for this, there’s always a workaround, but it forces the user to jump through hoops that shouldn’t even exist in the first place just to insert links.  After copying a post from Notes to the Wordpress Mobile app you have to save the draft to the web.  From there you go to your Wordpress control panel in Safari, go to the draft, go to the HTML editor, and from there you party like it’s 1999 and enter all of the links in your post manually with good old fashioned elbow grease and HTML.  Hardly an elegant solution, but it does have the advantage of working.

So is the iPhone perfect for blogging yet?  Not really.  Is any mobile platform short of a netbook with an air card perfect for blogging?  Definitely not, and you could argue that forking over $70/mo for 3G access on a laptop is even more less than ideal for most users, this writer included.

As much as I’ve criticized the blogging offerings on the iPhone in this post, I still have to admit that just being able to write an entry complete with links and upload it on the go is still shiny and new enough a concept that I’m willing to forgive most of the problems I’ve listed.  Of course that doesn’t mean that the problems should be ignored, and so I hope that someone at Wordpress Mobile is listening and will include better and more streamlined support for some of the features I’ve discussed in their inevitable 3.0 update.

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