Yesterday on Twitter, I mentioned that I had accidentally deleted a comment in the WordPress iPhone app. I thought I was in trouble considering the comment disappeared and there was no way to access the trash-can feature implemented in WordPress 2.9. When I logged into the WPTavern back-end today, I was relieved to see that the comment I deleted on the iPhone was in the trash bin. Upon searching the iPhone app forums today, I didn’t find any references to the trash feature but this could have been due to the fact that the search box on the forum doesn’t appear to search the forum at all. Instead, it performs a search of the WordPress.org support forums. Not sure why those two are linked together as it makes the iPhone forum search box useless.
To make matters slightly worst, there is a trash can icon that is used from within the app that deletes comments. This causes confusion, especially when I’m used to the trash button within WordPress itself.
I’ll be filing an inquiry today in the forum to see if trash will be put into the next version of the iPhone app. Until then, don’t blow a gasket when you accidentally delete a comment from within the WordPress app.
Just for the sake of consistency, here is the forum thread I created mentioning this issue.
http://iphone.forums.wordpress.org/topic/trash-feature-in-iphone-app?replies=1
I personally wish that WordPress would have designed the comments area more like the mail app on the iPhone.
One folder for Approved, another for Pending, another for Spam, and finally, Trash.
@Ronald – Well, I imagine they are going to have to change some things around, especially since Trash is not the same as deleting.
@Jeffro – Yep. I’ve considered making an Ajax Edit Comments type product for the iPhone, but browser based. If WordPress doesn’t get on the ball soon with some heavy-hitting comment features, I may just do that.
There was a specific discussion about trashed items and blog clients ( see this ticket for some reference – http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/11303 ). The challenge came in that the client applications didn’t know about trashed items, like posts and comments, so they would show up as normal posts and comments.
At the time I pushed for not exposing trashed items to clients. I chatted with westi about this and we agreed (at the time) that most (all?) clients wouldn’t know how to properly handle trashed items, so we hid them. With the intent that we’d revisit this item later.
Given the already massive amount of work for the merge in WP3.0 I don’t think this is a good time to re-visit this. This might be something good to take on in WP3.1.
When we start down that road we’ll be shouting it from the roof tops so that we give the blog client authors as much heads up as possible.
@Joseph Scott – Thanks for the detailed response Joseph. I felt it necessary though to at least tell people that if they do accidentally delete a comment in the iPhone app, the comment is not lost and can be recovered through the trash can in the desktop version of WordPress. I freaked out and I wouldn’t want anyone else to freak out like I did lol.
I’m not in any hurry but glad to see this is on the roadmap for a version in the future.
Yeah, ordinarily I am pretty much a big fan of the WP app and iPhone compatibility, but I also had a difficult time finding messages once they were, “trashed.”