How to set post slugs with WordPress' iOS apps

Until someone releases a better iOS app for WordPress, we kind of have to get by with their official offerings. While those apps are mostly OK, they force your slugs to be nothing more than hyphenated versions of the post titles; when your post titles are relatively long, the resulting permalinks can be unsightly and awkward. This shortcoming makes the apps totally unusable for me.

For the last few days I’ve been thinking about potential solutions to this problem, and then yesterday it dawned on me that I had already solved it with a plugin I wrote four years ago, called Slugger+. The purpose of that plugin was to allow for the management of slugs from within the venerable MarsEdit, which at the time, obviously didn’t support such a thing.

Fortuitously for me, and likely for many of you, the plugin can be used, without modification, with the WordPress apps. As explained on the project page, to get it up and running you simply need to enable the plugin and then insert, anywhere within the post body, [slug]slug-to-use[/slug].

Upon publishing the post, the plugin will find that text, set the post’s slug to slug-to-use and then remove the slug-defining code from the post. (Given that the WordPress apps don’t (yet?) support TextExpander, you may want to modify the plugin to make the matching text shorter (e.g., [s]slug-to-use[/s]).)

Happy (mobile) blogging!