It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a native writing app for WordPress. This will connect to your WordPress site and pull all of the posts in. The most integrated solution I’ve see (also for Mac) is MarsEdit. Drafts is fully focused on quick capture – so if you have ideas you want to jot down quickly and flesh out later, it’s a good app to check out. And now, you can even update published posts right from Ulysses! So good.ĭrafts is another good app, though you’ll need an extension to publish to WordPress. It also has native WordPress integration. It’s easy to use when you’re just getting started, and powerful enough to do basically anything I want it to do. The best part about using separate writing app is there are a wealth of them to choose from, depending on your operating system and preferences. Publish to WordPress, Ghost, Medium, or export as a Word Doc, PDF, or plain text file. Yes, you can get plugins and connect RSS feeds and yada yada.īut when you’re working with plain text, or markdown, you can write in a neutral format and then ship it off to whatever platform or file you’d like. Write Once, Publish Everywhereįinally, when you’re writing in WordPress, you’re basically just writing for WordPress. I’ve written blog posts, video scripts, full courses, and even books using Ulysses, because I can organize in a way that works with my brain.Īs an added bonus, most writing apps will have much better search functionality, making it easier to find what you’re looking for without a premium plugin. In Ulysses (my writing app of choice), I have folders, tags (or keywords), and filters. Organize Your WayĮveryone’s brains work differently, and sometimes just having categories and tags won’t cut it. On top of all of your posts living in the WordPress database, they’ll also live on your local machine…and in the case of iOS writing apps, iCloud too. And if you lose your internet connection, the fear that you may have lost work won’t wash over you in a cold sweat 3. Using a writing app means you can write without an internet connection. Perhaps the biggest benefit of using a writing app over WordPress is local backups. You can easily customize the fonts and colors to use work what’s best for you, and there aren’t a bevy of panels and options to work with. Writing apps are a blank canvas for you to compose your words. You’re also not distracted by other tabs and browser chrome. There are no distractions, lots of keyboard shortcuts so you never have to take your hands off the keyboard, and most support some shorthand formatting like markdown 2. The first reason is the same reason Matt decided that full screen mode should be the default in the block editor: writing apps are fully focused on writing. Why You Should Use a Separate Writing App But there are lots of reasons you should write somewhere and then send it to WordPress. People who’ve formed habits writing in the editor because it’s good enough.Īnd maybe for quick posts, that’s fine for you. I know that will probably rub a lot of people the wrong way. There were plugins, like Barley, that attempted to make this better (and did a pretty good job at it).īut really, if you want to write, you should use a writing app. Adding images wasn’t the easiest, and doing anything more than simple text was tough 1. It was at this point that you could reasonably write long-form pieces without fear of losing your work due to some browser or internet error.īut even working in the classic editor could be cumbersome. That was a time where the classic editor had auto saving and shortly after, browser backups with local storage. The WordPress editor perhaps had a small window where it was a good place for people to write, after 3.6 was released. Matt himself has said he wants it to be the, “operating system of the web,” which means a richer feature set, especially around creating and laying out content…but not necessarily writing.īut I’d argue that the WordPress editor has never really been the best place to write. WordPress has considerably shifted from a simple blogging platform. Earlier this week, my friend Justin Ferriman wrote a great post called Matt’s Page Builder, where he talks about the block editor trying to be two things: a place to write, and a page builder…and it’s more like the latter.
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