WordPress 2.0 for iPhone released! [Review]

Within the last several years, blogging has gone from a simple geeky thing enjoyed by tech journalists and gadget nerds to something that many people from all walks of life can partake in. Even more recently, with the explosion of smartphone usage, mobile blogging has started a sort of “rebirth” for the whole blogging scene since you can now take yourself and your blog on the road, expanding possibilities.

For iPhone users, there are several blogging apps each with their own pro’s and con’s. Since I run WordPress, my natural choice was the WordPress iPhone app. The first version was pretty good though was missing several features and abilities that just left it rather “meh” for me. Even other options I tried just weren’t quite working for my tastes so I just settled that for now, my mobile blogging experience would always rate a 3/5. Thankfully the WordPress team has come back to answer many complaints and requests with the first version of the app with version 2.0.


What you’ll immediately notice is you won’t be prompted for an update to your existing 1.0 WordPress application. Since it’s an entirely different app, you’re going to have to manually search for it. 2.0 brings a completely revamped UI so that managing your WordPress blog is easier, more intuitive, and faster. It’s worth mentioning that previous issues with self-hosted WordPress blogs have been cleared up with 2.0 so that both WordPress.com and WordPress.org (WordPress 2.7+ required) blogs operate seamlessly while on the go.

One big gripe I had with the original app is that it actually crashed fairly often for me. And of course, the timing was never perfect as it would choke and die right in the middle of post taking everything I had written so far with it. Why didn’t I stop and save? You know how it is — getting in the zone when writing can make you oblivious to pretty much everything else. The WordPress developers have responded with a new auto-save/restore feature that will prevent such losses when an app crash presents itself or your network connection vanishes. Whew!

Other notable features that add to the overall tweaked aesthetic appeal include commenter gravatars and re-worked listing display of posts/comments/pages. Overall, it’s more polished and looks nice. Another nifty tidbit that slipped in this update includes custom XML-RPC endpoints (Google it).

For the negatives, there really isn’t anything I’ve found yet save for the inability to directly reply to comments from with the comments screen. This omission is highly annoying and I was hoping it would have been remedied in the 2.0 release. Looks like we’re waiting until 3.0. Now before you flame me, it is possible to replay to comments, though it isn’t as intuitive as one would think. Instead of navigating to “Comments” -> select comment to reply to -> “push reply”, you instead of have to go to the actual post’s edit mode, and then write your replies to comments from there. Again, not intuitive. And as we speak, I just fired up the up after closing it and now I’m sitting staring at the “Blogs” page that simply lists the blogs I have synced with the app. Clicking on Gadgetsteria does nothing. Stay tuned on that one…

Wrapping up, WordPress 2.0 is a big update over it’s predecessor. Regardless if you have the first one or not, you need this one. Give it a shot and let us know how you like it.

After spending a good half hour with the new version, I can honestly say it is a very worth update that anyone and everyone use 1.0 should download.