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Drupal For iPhone Is No Longer A Myth (Drupad)

Drupal For iPhone Is No Longer A Myth (Drupad)

After waiting many, many months for a Drupal iPhone app to appear upon Steve Jobs app store, it looks like a developer has finally created an elegant Drupal app for fans of the CMS service.

Entitled Drupad, this iPhone app gives Drupal lovers the power to manage their site on the go and is even iOS 4 compatible (unlike many blog apps on the app store unfortunately).

Priced at $4.99 USD, Drupad may seem to be a bit pricey when compared to other CMS/blogging apps (with the exception being Joomla Admin Mobile which is twice as expensive!).

For those of you wondering whether this app is worth the price of a hamburger or sub sandwich, here is an in depth overview of Drupad for those addicted to all things Drupal (and that mysterious blue face that haunts me at night).

Balancing Power And Elegance

Despite being packed with powerful features, Drupad has done an excellent job in making their app “human friendly” (i.e. usable beyond the geek race).

This is not an app that was made to be merely functional, but designed so that anyone can navigate easily through the app (even if they do not quite understand the terminology).

Users of Drupad can easily check for available updates for their modules (which is similar to WordPress plugins), view their status report and run the Drupal Cron right from their iPhone!

Users can also place their site into “Maintenance mode” (which will take your Drupal site offline) if they suspect something is wrong with their site or (worse) if it has been hacked.

You can also view the profiles of various users and contact them if necessary (via email) as well as view published and unpublished articles through the app.

Last but not least you can moderate comments through the app, news that will probably not make many spammers very happy.

What’s Lacking?

Although it is exciting to see an elegant Drupal app (let alone one at all!), thus far users are unable to create content upon their Drupal sites, which might make Drupad unattractive for bloggers sporting Drupal.

You also can not respond back to comments made upon your site, and there is no offline mode which means iPhone lovers will need to avoid the dead zone.

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Drupad is currently planning on adding these features down the road (not to mention create an iPad version of Drupad), although for now bloggers may have to rely upon BlogPress for their Drupal content needs until Drupad can rise to the occasion.

Is Drupad Worth $4.99?

If your goal is only to manage content upon your site (as opposed to creating it) then yes, Drupad is worth every penny!

However Drupal bloggers (especially those using OnSugar) may want to wait until Drupad adds the ability to upload content upon their server which will hopefully images, audio and video too.

Drupad requires a module to be uploaded to your site before you can use the app on your iPhone, and currently only supports version 6.x (with support for 5.x and Drupal 7 in the future).

Either way it’s good to see Drupal finally make its way upon the app store, as having WordPress and Joomla dominate the iCMS space can get old after awhile.

View Comments (3)
  • A rather hefty price for a partially working concept app. The fact that you cannot create basic content (as in Drupal standard story or page) is a big no-no. This seems more of a proof of concept, even though we drupallers can use other apps to do so. Might consider it in the future, or if the price goes to 99 cents. Otherwise please find someone else to beta test your app. Looking forward to the next version.

  • D3 with me too (in reference to ditto as in d2). Anyway, I was installing this to my site and it needs to have the drupad apps and I thought it was free, now I learn it cost 4.99 a month and cannot post content/comments, a big disappointment.

    Anyway, i just stick first with Mobile tools ;)

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