WordPress WPhone Plugin
Submitted by MobilizeToday on 2009-12-07 00:00
Today we've decided to try out web based WordPress admin console available as WP plugin from Stephane Daury, Doug Stewart and Viper007Bond. While authors mentioned at theirs website that plugin is not entirely deprecated due to iPhone Wordpress.app released by WordPress team there were no recent updates available since last release as of November 2007. Nevertheless even if iPhone users are happy with app version of WordPress admin console there is a growing population of mobile users on Android/Palm WebOS/Symbian/Windows Mobile platforms that could benefit from web based console to their lovely WordPress based blogs. So let's start from the very begining:
1. After we installed plugin we followed with standard next step to activate it from WP admin console.
2. In order to test the plugin after above installation you need to log out and log in again with checked "Use mobile admin interface" option available at login page.
3.As a login result we get to the admin console served by newly installed plugin with following menu options: Write, Manage, Comments, Plugins, Users, Latest Activity. Unfortunately Blackberry and Windows Mobile based devices do not load CSS:
4. Under main navigation section "Write" there are 2 menu options located: Post and Page. Let's try to create a new blog post. There is a possibility to assign category, save the post or publish it.
Everything works perfectly at iPhone/iPod but for example at Palm Pre some random glitches due to device web browser or plugin itself but as a result page is not loaded completely sometimes that affects our ability to save our post or other changes. Similar issue appears across all the pages not just related to new post actions.
5. Section "Comments" contains menu options Edit commnts, Awaiting Moderation, Spam Comments. When you select any of them you will get list of relevant comments. But if you try to do anything with these comments you will be disappointed because plugin does not support any operations on a single comment and you will get "Unknown action" error message.
This error message appears at all tested mobile devices that leads us to conclusion that it is plugin's issue.
6. Menu option "Users" has sub items: User List&Search, Add New User, Your Profile. User supposed to be able to edit users, create new users and edit administrator profile. Unfortunately it is not possible to add a new user neither iPhone or Palm Pre.
7. After you will edit administrator profile and tap on "Update Profile" - you will be redirected to the blog front page with a 404 error message.
8. Menu option "Latest Activity" shows us last actions at the blog.
"Recent Posts" section works nice but once you select anything from the "Latest Comments" list you'll get again an error "Unknown action" at tested devices.
In overall plugin works good at iPhone and Android devices. Initial development focus on iPhone and later on Android reflects the maturity of the plugin for these platforms. Due to lack of support of actions on comments and user administration we wouldn't mark it as "Excellent" for iPhone and Android. As mentioned earlier at Palm Pre plugin has random issues with page loading. Since Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices do not load plugin's CSS page looks poor but still main operations are fully functional.
Administration menu is changed a lot and looks quite different from default desktop version of WordPress. User may work with pages, posts and plugins. Standard desktop options Media, Links, Appearance, Tools and Settings are not available for mobile. This restricts full scale administering while at the same time still allows to perform basic admin actions from the mobile phone.