Barley is a new WordPress plugin that lets you edit the text and content of your posts and pages from the front end of your site, rather than going into the back-end editor.
This workflow makes a lot of sense. And Barley does a very good job at implementing it. For me, the vast majority of edits I make to my site are fixing typos and broken links. And, usually, I find myself on the front-end permalink first (because someone pointed out the typo via email or Twitter, giving me a link to the page).
I’ve spent some time with Barley over the past week and it’s very well done. You just click your cursor in the text and you can write, edit, and more — add in links, change text to bold, write whole paragraphs, etc.
However, I have one quibble that I think is a deal breaker for me. After a post has been edited in Barley, the back-end text of the article gets converted from Markdown to HTML. I use a different Markdown plugin here on shawnblanc.net than I do on The Sweet Setup, and Barley converted my markdown text to HTML formatting on both sites. It’s not a destructive change at all, and I fully trust Barley. But, I also like to keep my posts in Markdown. So, we’ll see.
Barley is on subscription pricing plan. It’s $12/year to use it. If it sounds interesting, I definitely think it’s worth checking out. It could remove a lot of friction in your typo-maintenance workflow, and more (like the fact you can write whole posts right there in the browser!).