The most popular blogging engine, WordPress has made significant changes to their Mobile apps especially android. WordPress.com only powers approximately over 72,374,794 websites and the self-hosted version powers more than just blogs, which created a need to support mobile publishing, so wordpress decided to create its wordpress Android app in 2010.
Automatic didn’t stop at creating the app, they also made it open source and shared the code on GitHub, and they have slowly added features for both wordpress.com and self-hosted wordpress blog. I must say wordpress.com blogs enjoy more features with the app such as stats are now natively built into the app, Likes on posts are also available for self-hosted wordpress site. All users however enjoy services such the ability to create new posts, comment, add featured images, upload media, quick posts, quick videos edit pages and delete posts.
What are you going to love about the app?
If you use wordpress, you are probably a blogger, writter or content creator and sometimes it gets tiresome to carry a laptop around all day, or you probably want to publish or edit on the go, some stories deserve immediate publicity and wordpress mobile apps give you the power to do so, because you can login into the app and edit, create or publish a post on the go. Its even better on a tablet. Just in case you worry about having your website in your pocket, they added a fix i have posted below.
Forget the missing featured image saga, the app now lets you add a featured image to your story so that your website maintains its look. You will even get notifications for comments made to your post so long as you are using the built in wordpress commenting system.
Is it Secure?
For now YES, however with wordpress you have to take the measures to guard it yourself. Luckily in the latest release a pin lock feature has been added, previously i used to logg out of the app and clear data so that my kid bro didn’t delete my post or any malicious being.
Now Automattic has added a 4 digit pin-lock feature for the app on top of the login details, just in case you had logged in and lost your phone you don’t have to worry if you activated the feature by going to setting and tapping Pin Lock. More to security, the app doesn’t allow a user to change the login password using the application so you are ‘Safe’. Safe is in quotes because security is something we cannot exhaust and new exploits are developed daily and with WordPress 3.7.x wordpress security updates are applied automatically.
New Features?
You can now view your Media Gallery from your wordpress android app, you really need to sigh because adding an image into a post was really difficult before this feature was added. You can edit your photos by adding captions, descriptions, adding photos and videos to posts straight to your phone while using the app. The Gallery looks pretty to with a tile-like layout.
Besides the Media Gallery, you can also create tiled galleries using your phone by long pressing images in the media gallery.
Native Stats really look amazing, forget the old Stats feature that would redirect you to a framed webpage, now the stats are built into the app to show you visitors and views, followers & shares, clicks, referrers and search engines. Too bad you have to have a wordpres.com account to use this feature.
Just in case you don’t like anything about the app, they have shared the source code, and WordPress has an active developer and support base.
Screenshot Source: Google Play
