A while ago, I wrote a post about why I write in Markdown, and I mentioned the app Ulysses for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. In that article, I said it was not worth purchasing because it was expensive. After all, I simply write on my blog, and paying 44.99 € for it was too much. Well, today I changed my mind, and here is why!
Why I Purchased Ulysses
On the 3rd of August 2016, Ulysses was updated to version 2.6, which introduces some cool features. The best of them, and the one that made me change my mind and purchase it, is the integration with WordPress.
Ulysses supports Medium already but not WordPress yet. With the 2.6, they added the complete support for WordPress. You can write your posts directly from Ulysses, like I’m doing now, and publish them on your self-hosted WordPress blog or WordPress.com, but you can also add the featured image, categories, and tags!
I think it’s amazing, and I wanted to test it.
Setting Up Ulysses for WordPress
Once you installed Ulysses, go to Ulysses > Preferences > Accounts and click Add Account….
Choose WordPress.com from the dropdown to connect it to your WordPress.com blog or Custom WordPress if you want to use your self-hosted WordPress blog.
After that, complete the form with your site information, URL, username, and password, and click on Log In. Once you log in, you will see your blog in the list on the left (you can connect multiple blogs) and your data on the right.
Now, you are ready to publish directly from Ulysses.
Publish Your First Post from Ulysses
Open the Markdown editor and create a new post. Once you are ready to publish, click on the post with the right mouse button and then choose Quick Export….
You will see a modal box on the top left; there’s a dropdown. Click on it and choose Publishing:
Choose the blog where you want to publish it and click Publish…. It won’t be published immediately, so do not worry.
From the new screen, you can edit the data of your post. Click on Show Details on the bottom left to change the title, choose the categories and tags, add a featured image, and more.
When you are ready to publish the post, click on Publish, and you will be redirected to your WordPress site to reread the article!
Easy, no?
One cool thing to note is that if you add images to your post in Ulysses, they will also be automatically uploaded to your site!
Shortcodes and Plugins Integration
One of the things that I didn’t like is that I’m not able to use shortcodes properly because Ulysses thinks that I want to create a link because the link in Markdown is created with [Title](http://url.com), so as soon as I start typing [ it triggers the link edit mode and breaks my shortcode.
Maybe there’s an option to remove it. I don’t know yet, but if I find something, I’ll update this post!
Also, as far as I know, you can’t update posts. If you try to publish it again, it will create a new post instead of updating the existing one. Am I missing something?
Another thing that is missing is the integration with plugins. I know I’m asking a lot, but I hope the developers will consider supporting at least the most popular plugins bloggers use, like Yoast SEO.
One last thing, which is not really a bad point, is that it uses XML-RPC to publish to your site. If you disable it for any reason, it won’t work.
I’ll Keep Using It, and You Should Too!
Ultimately, I like this new feature, and I think I’ll keep using Ulysses to write on my blog, even if I’ll still need to go to the Dashboard to finalize the post before publishing it.
Hopefully, this feature will inspire you to blog more! Don’t forget to connect your posts by creating related posts at the end of each article of your blog.
Updates from Ulysses’ Support Team
I wrote to their support asking for help with the issues mentioned above. I have to say that they were quite fast and helpful in replying! Kudos to their support team.
- Regarding shortcodes, you can avoid creating links by putting a backslash in front of the first square bracket. So, if you want to use a shortcode, just write it like this:
\[shortcode]Your content\[/shortcode]. - There was a problem with the
<!--more-->tag because Ulysses converts the double dashes into smart dashes. You can use raw source tags when writing the article to avoid this. So wrap your More tag in tildes, like this:~<!--more-->~or disable the Smart Dashes in Edit > Substitutions. - Updating posts is a confirmed issue. At the moment, there’s no way to do it. They added this to their feature requests list, but there’s no ETA yet on when it will be implemented.
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