WordPress for WP7 Dev

I spent some time considering future feature development, and where we can take this app now that 1.2 has cleaned up most of the current bugs/issues. Following is the result of my brainstorming session, which can serve as a starting point for roadmap decisions:

Pre-Mango:

• Integrate into Photo app’s Share Picker
  • Doing so would allow user to start a new WordPress post with picture auto-added directly from the camera/photo app.
  • The extensibility story here will change with Mango, but it shouldn’t be too hard to migrate when we upgrade the app to Mango.
  • MSDN Documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff967563.aspx
• Location sharing feature similar to other WordPress mobile apps
• Improved tags interface for post/page editor. Categories have a nice set of screens for selecting/adding/removing, but tags are currently a ‘dumb’ text field. Auto-complete might be nice, or a “most used tags” pop-up like in the web admin.
• Better control over publication status and publication date.
• Unify post and page editor control logic, including WYSIWYG, media, tags/categories
• Support setting/editing permalink for pages (and posts?)
• Support full set of page values (e.g., template, parent)
• Add ability to search posts/pages
  • Add internal linking (ala WP 3.1 feature) to page/post editor interface
  • Might be substantially easier when using Mango’s Local Database feature (see below)

Mango:

• Use new System Tray Progress Indicator
  • Explanation & screenshot: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jaimer/archive/2011/06/04/system-tray-progress-indicator.aspx
  • Documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh202868.aspx (bottom of page)
• Tile improvements:
  • Support Secondary Tiles so that users can pin individual blogs to the home screen
    • Show the blog’s name as the tile’s “Title” value instead of generic “WordPress”
    • Replace WordPress logo with something blog-specific?
  • Show unmoderated comment count on the live tile
    • Implement background agent to periodically poll for this count? (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh202942(v=VS.92).aspx)
  • MSDN Documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh202948(v=VS.92).aspx
• Push notifications for comments
  • This would require a plugin for WP.org blogs and ??? for WP.com blogs
    • I know the iOS app team is doing work to get push notifications for WP.com blogs; perhaps we can ride on that wave?
    • Since I’m primarily a WP.org user, I’d be happy to take a stab at writing a WP.org plugin
  • We can use a polling periodic background agent as a fallback, but they only run every 30 minutes
  • Let user choose notification type (toast and/or tile)
  • MSDN Documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff402558(v=VS.92).aspx
• Use Local Database as data store instead of huge XML serializations into Isolated Storage
  • Let’s us use LINQ to query data store, making tasks like search or filtering much easier and more performant
  • Reduces memory footprint as we can load only the data subsets that we need, instead of loading entire XML blob
  • Can perform syncing at app load, using a periodic background agent, or a resource-intensive agent
• Add mobile operator info to stats upload
  • Related Trac ticket: http://windowsphone.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/16
  • MSDN Documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.phone.net.networkinformation.devicenetworkinformation.cellularmobileoperator(v=VS.92).aspx

Bonus:

• Keep track of the XML-RPC GSoC ’11 Project and help the improvements get into trunk
• http://gsoc2011.wordpress.com/author/nprasath002/
• The new functionality would allow us to expand the feature set significantly, including
• User management
• Custom post types support
• Blog settings management
• Post/page custom fields
• Custom taxonomies
• Post formats