New WordPress.com signup

[johnny5]

I'm not sure if this is a bug or not, but when you signup for a WordPres?.com is loads a remote web page which is really tiny on the iPad, not centred, and not particularly inviting.

As you fill in the form, it behaves very strangely, with cursors that float in odd places, and things that appear for no reason

[irbrad]

I attached a patch file to this ticket that switches the iOS app from using the web view for WPcom signups to using XMLRPC. This also should fix ticket #737.

[koke]

I looked at the patch today and there are a few concerns:

• Any networking should be done in the background, otherwise the UI freezes until the network call finishes. This might not look like a big deal when your connection is fast and operational, but can lead to trouble on unstable or slow connections. It could even be cause of rejection from the App Store
• It's still asking me to activate existing blogs. Any blog that was already in the app from a previous version, or that it's just added with an existing account shouldn't need verify activation. Right now all I get is a list of blogs asking for activation, even if they've been there for a while or are self hosted blogs.
• Since the user is most likely to switch to the mail app after signing up, we should check for activation when the app becomes active. Having tap to check too is nice, but we can anticipate that

[irbrad]

I will address all of these issues this week. I will double check all of the network calls and move any still in the foreground to a background thread. I notice that the tap for activation is still in the foreground and causing a slowdown.

The existing blogs was something I just didn't think about and I'll handle for them accordingly. Since I keep deleting the app and reinstalling I didn't have any legacy data to handle for. :)

Item 3 is already handled for since the activation runs on every load of the blog list. I will add the check when the app is loaded via wordpress:// though.

[irbrad]

I added a new patch that fixes the items mentioned above.

[irbrad]

switches signups from using web views to xmlrpc calls

[koke]

Decide if we want to do this native with Brad's patch or use the new optimized web version for 3.0.

Even if we go for the web version, we could use the extra integration to activate via wordpress:// url on the email

[daniloercoli]

Working on the web version. No activation email, but fallback URL on the last page of the activate flow.

[daniloercoli]

The new signup workflow is available on .COM and the fallback URL seems to work fine.