Comments on: Will Apple Put WordPress in the iPhone?

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By: MikeT

MikeT — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:22:19 +0000

Similarly, WordPress is the most popular blogging platform. In this case however, the other platforms wouldn’t be fully excluded thanks to the iPhone’s excellent Safari browser.

So in that light, bundling WordPress would seem to be even less far-fetched than bundling YouTube. And of course, Apple has already done the latter.

That’s all well and good, however there is not a clear victor in this space like there is in video sharing. There are still a lot of bloggers that use Blogger and other platforms, and I can’t see Apple making a program that arbitrarily locks all of those users out. It would be arbitrary because there are excellent, though not quite as robust as some of us would like, XML-RPC APIs that allow you to target anything from WordPress, to Blogger, to Movable Type.

By: John Lamansky

John Lamansky — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:53:22 +0000

@MikeT: By bundling YouTube, Apple picked the most popular video sharing site and left out the videos on all the other smaller sites. The other sites don’t even work on the iPhone due to the lack of Flash support.

Similarly, WordPress is the most popular blogging platform. In this case however, the other platforms wouldn’t be fully excluded thanks to the iPhone’s excellent Safari browser.

So in that light, bundling WordPress would seem to be even less far-fetched than bundling YouTube. And of course, Apple has already done the latter.

By: MikeT

MikeT — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:36:13 +0000

It still wouldn’t make a lot of sense for them to do that. It might make sense for Automattic, but not Apple because Apple is not big on being locked into anything but their own stuff. Why would they want to lock into WordPress, and not offer the same features to Movable Type, TypePad, Vox and Blogger users? Not to mention those who use other blog systems that are less popular.

By: John Lamansky

John Lamansky — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:27:57 +0000

@MikeT: “A native program that interfaces to your blog” — that’s exactly what I’m talking about. (I agree, it would be very silly to actually host WordPress on the iPhone.)

When Apple integrated YouTube with the iPhone, that didn’t mean they ran a YouTube hosting service on the phone. Similarly, if Apple were to integrate WordPress with the iPhone, that would not mean that WordPress would be hosted; it would just provide an easy way to access and use it.

And for the record, there are WordPress plugins that provide iPhone-friendly interfaces for both the front end and the back end. I’d imagine this potential iPhone bundling would simply be a more integrated back-end administration solution.

By: MikeT

MikeT — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:59:03 +0000

Ironically, it would be easier to run Movable Type on it than WordPress. Movable Type already has a plug-in that creates an iPhone-specific user interface, and it supports SQLite out of the box, making it so that it could leverage the existing SQLite already on the iPhone. Perl and a very basic web server are the only things that would have to be added to run Movable Type on an iPhone.

Though, again… these are low-powered CPU environments. Why on Earth would you want to have most of a LAMP stack on them, when you can just write a native program that interfaces to your blog?

By: MikeT

MikeT — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:55:07 +0000

It’s not going to happen. In order to do this, they would have to distribute PHP and MySQL on the iPhone. First of all, that software is way too heavy for the iPhone, for what little benefit you would get out of it. Second, Apple’s own license prohibits porting dynamic languages like PHP to the iPhone in the first place, so they aren’t going to tease developers with a PHP runtime on the iPhone, wagging their fingers saying “now don’t y’all go breakin’ the license, ya hear!”

There are XML-RPC APIs that already allow them to write blogging software for the iPhone if they want to bundle something like that by default. They’re not great, but the standard APIs that all major blog suites use are good enough to get the job done for basic blogging.