Managing A Drupal Site On The iPad

For the past couple of months I've had my hands on an Apple iPad and one of the first things I was interested in trying out was how effectively I could manage my Drupal sites with the device. Since I didn't want to jump to hasty conclusions about how good or bad the experience is I've waited all this time to write about it. In general I'll say that it's not a bad experience. The larger screen makes managing your site much more realistic than on the iPhone which I think is nearly an impossible task because of the small screen size. With that said you won't want to sound much time engaging in hard core site building on the iPad either.

Here's what you can do. You can access any menu item even with the Administration Menu module that places a bar at the top of the screen. The drop down menus work fine so you can navigate around very quickly. You can enter text anywhere there is a plain text box. HTML formatting must be accomplished by hand. I haven't tried it yet but one of the modules that adds the correct code for you at the press of a button might make things easier. It's on my to do list to try that. You can move around the administration section and change settings pretty easily. Comment moderation and responding is also very doable especially if you don't rely on a rich text editor. You can create basic blocks and nodes (I'm creating this post on my iPad) as well but the limitations I'll mention in a moment make it a frustrating task for anything beyond basic text entry.

Here's what you can't do. You can't use a WYSIWYG editor in a text area. You can work around that by making sure the "switch to plain text editor" link is available. That allows you to enter plain text but also wipes out the line breaks once you preview the node. So your nodes or blocks will have limited formatting. You also can't access your local file system which means that you can't upload attachments or images. So the expectation should be that you can do basic editing and content creation but nothing fancy. I use the Popups API to make things easier when managing blocks and comments. I've found that the resulting popups don't scroll so that module is not very helpful if you're on the iPad. You also can't scroll within or resize the text input area which makes creating long nodes very difficult. In fact nothing that usually involves clicking and dragging, or hovering the mouse works as far as I can see. In general the experience of managing Drupal via the iPad is a mixed bag. You can get to your site settings, manage comments and create basic nodes and blocks. Since I do my most serious managing of the site at home this level of access works fine for me. I'd like to upgrade the experience though. I suppose it's on Apple to offer access to the file system and perhaps upgrade mobile Safari to work with WYSIWYG editors. Even Google Docs doesn't work yet so we're not alone there.

The bottom line is that there are limitations that prevent anyone from doing serious development on a Drupal site via the iPad. So if you have your heart set on building and creating content on a light weight device then a netbook is a much better choice. So that's my take. If you have suggestions for work arounds, modules or helpful apps I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

Here are some screenshots that I added to this post after creating it on the iPad. From left to right they show what it looks like when editing a block, activating a popup dialog and editing a comment entry, all in landscape mode. I like the landscape mode better for management because it allows me to see the appropriate areas of the screen close up and the keyboard size is much more usable.