Posts is an iPhone and iPad app for the Blogger and WordPress bloggers out there. It features a gorgeous interface that supports multiple blogs on Blogger and both worpdress.com and self-hosted blogs with wordpress.org. The built-in post editor is very powerful, browsing through posts is a visually appealing experience, and comment management is a breeze.
After adding all your blogs (or creating one with Posts), you can view your posts in a visual timeline view. In landscape, there will be a left sidebar that gives quick access to all your blogs and their posts, comments drafts, submissions, and pages. The main part of the screen will display you selection. When viewing posts, they are displayed in a horizontal timeline that shows all the posts under each day. Each thumbnail shows the main image, the title, and a small excerpt. One of my favorite features is that you can view all the posts of all your blogs in this view if you choose.
If you tap on a post, a preview will popup that displays the content of the post. It doesn't visually look the same as it does on your blog, but is more like what you'd see on a read-later apps like Pocket or Apple's built-in Reader feature in Safari. From this preview, you can edit, view comments, delete, or share.
When adding a post, Posts supports a rich text environment as well as HTML input. The rich text screen allows you to choose a style (body, heading, blockquote, etc), font size, bold, italic, strikethrough, justification, hyperlink, and more. If you insert a photo, you can hold your finger down on it to edit the size and wrap type as well as src, alt, and tooltip information.
One thing I don't like about Posts is adding tags and categories. Both are shown as a list, which is great for categories, but terrible for tags. I have hundreds of tags and the last thing I want to do is scroll through a giant list to select the ones I want. It'd be faster to just type a comma-separated list. For categories, the lists are in alphabetical order and do not account for subcategories. So if you have a hierarchy similar to Pets > Photos and another one that's Kids > Photos, you will see two Photos categories listed without any way of distinguishing them. Terrible.
One of the other great features of Posts is comment moderation. For each comment, you can reply, mark it as approved, unapproved, spam, or delete, and quickly view the article that the comment is associated with.
The good
- Supports Blogger and both wordpress.com and self-hosted wordpress.org blogs
- Support for multiple blogs
- Browse through posts on all bogs at once
- Powerful built-in post editor
- Manage comments
- Work offline
The bad
- Category list isn't nested
- Can't add tags via a typed lists separated by commas
The conclusion
Posts is an excellent app for managing Blogger and WordPress blogs. I'm not a Blogger user, but I can confidently claim that Posts is a much better iPad app for WordPress than WordPress' native iPad app. It's not cheap, but if efficient blogging with your iPad is something you value, Posts is worth every penny.
