This post is being written in Sublime Text thanks to a new package by Nicolas Dienstbier — who has a much cooler way of shortening his name than I do (what could I do? rnlds? Actually…) — called Sublpress. The premise of Sublpress is simple — use Sublime to manage your WordPress site(s). You can do just about anything you could do logging into your site and you can manage multiple sites. But, of course, the most obvious thing you’d want to use it for is posts, right? I mean, that and never having to leave your IDE which is pretty cool, too.
Sublpress uses the command palette for everything. Thanks to a recent update, once I’m connected, I can go straight to new post. And so it is that I am typing this in Sublime and not the WordPress dashboard.
Since working with Dropplets, I like using a simple text editor (okay, maybe not a simple text editor — but rather one that has extra capabilities to handle formatting and displaying text) to write posts. And while I’d probably prefer composing this post in markdown, and uploading someplace automagically (via drag and drop or some kind of autonomous synchronization), using Sublime is pretty nifty, too, and it may turn out to be my preferred method of posting.
I will say that I have a couple pet peeves about Sublpress. One is inherent in the framework and that’s the lag for connecting to your site to do certain actions. Originally (before I raised the issue on GitHub), you had to go into the Manage Posts screen before you could create a new post. I have thousands of posts, and this made Sublpress just crap out before it ever got to that screen, so I asked for it to be moved to a higher-level screen so you wouldn’t need to go in there. But there are similar issues with selecting categories or tags — it has to load all of the categories or tags before you can assign them to the post. And as of this writing, I have to go to Manage Taxonomies → post_tag to create a new tag and then go into Post Actions → Modify Terms and Taxes → post_tag to assign that new tag to the post, rather than just being able to add a list of comma-separated tags the way I can in the WordPress Edit Post screen, creating new tags on the fly if they don’t already exist, all the while waiting for Sublpress to connect to the site and query for that information (on the flipside, though, I don’t need to wait once I’ve told it to do something, e.g. I’m typing this now as I’m waiting for my tags to pop up). You can’t set a featured image for a post and — considering you need to connect to the server (and wait for it to respond) just to pull up a list of the available post statuses — it’s not very reasonable for actually publishing posts. But it’s still under development and there’s lots of room for improvement and growth.