I choose WordPress to build most of my sites. There are numerous reasons for this, the two most notable ones being total control and extensive community support. If you’re stuck at something, you’ll almost always find a solution either on their forums or by someone who’s blogged about it. There are thousands and thousands of free/paid themes and plugins available for WordPress, which makes it a great platform to work on.
While WordPress comes with its own web-based control panel that lets you publish and edit content, it also offers an API for native 3rd party clients. Both iOS and Mac have some great WordPress apps, including my personal favorite MarsEdit and even the official (and universal) WordPress app for iOS. However, most of the apps I’ve come across have always lacked one important feature without which it was impossible for me to rely on those apps completely. None of the apps support the use of Custom Fields, something which I use heavily on Beautiful Pixels and Nuclear Bits. This wasn’t an issue on the Mac where you could just use the browser, but iOS still lacked a kick-ass WordPress app. But then came along Poster. And oh what a marvelously brilliant piece of software Poster is!
Poster is a universal iOS app that works with both WordPress.com and (self-hosted) WordPress.org blogs. It boasts a minimal, clean and genuinely elegant coat of UI all over that’s just a delight to work with. It features full WordPress integration and supports pretty much every feature you’d need to publish from your iPhone or iPad. The app lets you create & edit posts and pages while also letting you set the Post Status, Custom Fields, Post Formats, Post Slug, Tags, Categories and even lets you schedule the post at whatever time and date you want. There’s Markdown support for the content as well and the app is smart enough to convert it to HTML before publishing. Poster also letting you import your posts from either the clipboard or even Dropbox. Before I forget, there’s TextExpander Touch integration too.
Poster also supports native image uploads, so you can either take a photo or choose one from the library and it’ll upload it to WordPress and fetch the image URL and add it to the post. This works out great for me, since I can use the image URL in a Custom Field before I publish the post. You can add your Custom Fields from the Settings of each blog you add, and specify the values for every post you compose with it. Once published, you can view the posts in Safari or share them via Twitter or email.
Poster lets you add up to 5 blogs and seamless switches between them. At just $3.99 on the App Store, Poster is—without a doubt—a must have app for your iPhone and iPad if you have a WordPress blog. The app is made my workflow infinitely better ever since I installed it on my iPad.