Wilde – a mac app to manage wordpress publishing

Another day another look at an alternative way of dealing with wordpress. Don’t get me wrong, I think the web based dashboard of wordpress is great, but I’m always looking for something that reduces friction in the publishing process.

Wilde promises to be an alternative that desktop based and that’s the app I’m writing the current post with.

First impressions – the interface seems straight forward enough. On the left I have options for posts, drafts and pages as well as scheduled content. I can add new local or remote drafts.  In the middle is where I add the text content and lay everything out, while the right side has a media browser which should make adding images easy, I’m doing that now with this screen capture:

Hmm. Well that was relatively painless. I think an improvement over the web based media handler, although there was more of a delay than I’d like before it showed up. Looks like it wants to fully upload the image before it shows up in the media browser.

Another frustration: I keep having to scroll this window up to type. The window will not auto scroll with my typing and I can’t scroll up past the bottom of the entered text.

Oh, that is really frustrating. As a work around I’ve just added a whole bunch of blank line returns so I have some working space without having to manually scroll up after each line with the mouse.  This seems like a bug and one that I imagine would not that difficult to fix.

I’m going to continue to use Wilde to see if if works for me – beyond the previously mentioned issue it seems well laid out and effective.  The next post I write will be published using Wilde as well, probably using the scheduled post feature.  If I don’t come back to edit this post it’s all gone smoothly.

If you work with wordpress you can find your own copy of Wilde at theescapers.com.

EDIT 1: Looks like the paragraph spacing I see in WYSIWYG mode is not published, I’m adding double line returns to see if that works.  I like that you can drag and drop featured images on posts.

EDIT 2: Hmm. I can’t find an easy way to publish this edited version of the post.

EDIT 3: Ah. Switch to live preview and hit save.  Looks like there are a few rough edges to this app in terms of my work flow but worth exploring further.

EDIT 4: Alright, one last frustration. In order to get the paragraph spacing I wanted I had to go into the HTML and remove div code around each paragraph. I suspect this is a problem between my site template and the way Wilde generates post code.