The very much anticipated official WordPress client for BlackBerry has been released in the form of a public beta. The WordPress team joined forces with the guys over at Danais (makers of the Mopress BlackBerry blogging app) to produce this highly requested BlackBerry application.
On first look, the application appears clean and crisp with a nice UI. Upon downloading and installing the app from here I was prompted to save some permissions to allow the app to access certain functions on my device. I did so and proceeded to run the app. I entered the URL and login credentials for my blog and very excitedly attempted to connect via the ‘add blog’ menu option. After about a minute of waiting I was greeted with the message ‘Bad URL, username or password. I checked and double checked the settings I had entered and the same message kept appearing. I logged in to my WordPress admin panel via my BOLT browser and checked to ensure the the XML-RPC remote publishing protocol was enabled. It was. I was stuck unable to connect like this for about a day before I decided to check the application permissions. Lo and behold, for some reason the application did not have the correct permissions set to access my device connections, this after I was explicitly prompted to save those permissions on installing the app which I am 100% sure I did. I set all the permissions to ‘allow’ and tried to connect. Of course, within seconds I saw my blog title appear and the app was downloading all my posts, pages and comments.
Composing posts using the app is relatively simple. You can add tags, select the relevant post category, and insert pictures. One issue I noted with inserting pictures is that they always appear at the bottom of the post. There is currently no way to align pictures you insert into the post using the application. After composing my post and changing the post status from ‘local draft’ to ‘published’ I attempted to submit the post by selecting the ’submit’ menu option. After about a minute or so of ’sending data’ I was greeted with a nasty, jumbled, somewhat nonsensical error message. Interestingly enough, despite the error message my post was safely submitted to my blog.
This WordPress for BlackBerry is clearly still in a state of infancy. There are spelling errors in the UI, unhelpful instructions and error messages and other very basic functionality is lacking. Features I would like to see in the actual non-beta release include the ability to select BIS-B as a connection option, the ability to apply even simple formatting to text(underline, bold, italic etc.), the ability to manipulate picture positioning, alignment and size and the ability to switch between normal text and HTML editing modes. So far though it is a decidedly huge step in the right direction. It is an open source project so I have no doubt that it will quickly evolve into a very robust application. Hats off to the folks at Automattic for delivering on their promise in such good time. I’m still patiently waiting on the Skype app for BlackBerry that was slated for release 2 months ago in May.
P.S. Many people have difficulty connecting to their blog using this app because the XML-RPC option is not enabled in their WordPress install. It can be enabled on the ‘Writing’ page under ‘Settings’ in your WordPress admin panel.
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J from Montana, United States on 
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i really love the cool features of Blackberry. my hubby and i both have Blakberries and we use it all the time to communicate.