WooTumblog and WordPress Review

I tried adding the WooTumblog plugin to my WordPress installation so I could quickly and easily blog from the $5 Express iPhone App. I had such high hopes that this was an actual solution for those who enjoy Tumblr and want it at their own WordPress blog. However, it was a complete failure for the following reasons:

  1. iPhone app does not support posting video links for quick and automatic embedding. A quick fix is to use the existing Link option (which doesn’t work for me; see below) to recognize popular video sharing sites (Vimeo, YouTube) and hand off the link to Viper to handle it.
  2. WP Dashboard allows you to post video entries, but you have to use the full embed code. It would be nice if it used Viper’s Video Quicktags instead. The whole point of WooTumblog and the app is to make things simple. Having to copy and paste embed code is not an option. You’re plugin should be smart enough to figure it out, or work with another plugin (like Viper) to handle it for them.
  3. From my iPhone I posted an image and a quote and they worked.
  4. From my iPhone I posted a link and the link never appeared in my post. I got a title that linked to my post, but the article itself didn’t contain the link — anywhere but in the Custom Fields. I am fairly sure I need to replace my code with their PHP title code, but if that’s the way it’s supposed to work then I don’t like it. It goes against how WordPress blogs work… the title should always link to the full article, not anything else. The link should be embedded into the article’s body.

They have special themes that you can purchase that supposedly work out of the box with the plugin and the iPhone app, but I don’t like any of them and I’m not willing to give up my current theme.

Too bad… as this looked like the perfect solution for quick blogging of videos from Vimeo and YouTube, as well as interesting links. I wish I could get it to work, but after blowing a few hours on this I am throwing in the towel.

If there are any WordPress developers out there who are interested in modifying the WooTumblog plugin to meet my needs, please contact me with your rate. I’d do it, but I don’t have time (hence the reason why I got this plugin to begin with–to save time posting to my blog!)

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