According to a recent study by our Marketing & Research Division, people like to write online. A lot. Perhaps even more interesting, an increasing number of these self-described “internet word enthusiasts” use Bear to draft their essays before sharing them with the world.

This got us thinking: what if we could make it a little easier for Bear users to publish their writing? Once again, our Marketing & Research Division sprung into action to find where all the hip kids publish essays online.

The answer? WordPress, which powers over 30 percent of the words on the internet. We reached out to the wonderfully warm WordPress folks, and they loved the idea! We got to working together and landed on something we think you’ll like.

With today’s update to WordPress for iOS, you can now publish Bear notes to WordPress blogs. It’s really simple to use:

First, make sure you update Bear and WordPress

In Bear, tap the share sheet at the top right of a note

Tap WordPress in the top row of options (learn how to enable app extensions on iOS)

The WordPress app will open. If you have multiple blogs, a screen will appear so you can pick one as your post’s destination

A draft screen will appear with your post filled in, complete with proper formatting of all headings, links, text styles, lists, and even photos

Note: To give your blog post a title, make sure your Bear note begins with an H1 header tag.

An example of sharing a Bear note to the WordPress iOS app to create a blog post

Under the hood

If you’re curious about the technical details of what’s going on: we built an open source library for processing TextBundle files. TextBundle is an open standard for sharing plain text files that include attachments like photos. WordPress then worked to add TextBundle support to its iOS app. Bear hands your note off to WordPress as a TextBundle file, and WordPress converts it into a blog post.

This also means that today’s update is not technically a custom Bear integration. The feature is built on an open standard and our open source library that other developers can integrate. Open standards for sharing files make us happy.

Happy ‘pressing

Go forth, you insightful internet word enthusiasts. Get your ideas out into the world easier than ever with Bear and WordPress for iOS.