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Tuesday, 24 March 2009 21:48

Using Windows Live Writer to edit Joomla! content

Written by  Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
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One of the things every blogger is aware is the existence of off-line post editors. One of them, Windows Live Writer by Microsoft, is an extremely professional solution – available at no cost. What most Joomla! site owners are not aware of, though, is that this tool can be used to effectively edit new content of their web site.

 

Introduction

I am not a Microsoft fan boy, as you may have observed reading my posts. However, Windows Live Writer is one of the two reasons I even decided to buy my EeePC with Windows XP instead of Linux – the other being that Skype for Windows is far better and more complete than the Linux version. I mean, this tool makes publishing content on the web a no-brainer. If you’ve ever used any office application, be it Word or OpenOffice Writer, you really already know what to do to write great-looking content. I happen to like easy and elegant solutions. And this is our topic today: implementing an easy and elegant content publishing system for Joomla!, one that allows you to edit content even when off-line.

First things first, let’s take a look at how this works. The Windows Live Writer software on your PC communicates with your site through XML-RPC, using one of the supported protocols. Quite obviously, your site must support XML-RPC communications and “talk” one such protocol.

The good news is that Joomla! includes an XML-RPC server out-of-the-box. The bad news is that the single protocol implementation it uses – the Blogger protocol – is buggy and it’s recommended to turn it off. Even more, it doesn’t support some basic stuff, such as posting images. Thankfully, the good people at Joomler!.net have written an excellent implementation of the Movable Type protocol, made it into a plug-in and distribute free of charge.

Setting up your site

The first step is to download the plug-in on your PC. Next up, log in to your site’s back-end and click on the Global Configuration button. Click on the System tab and change the “Enable Web Services” options to “Yes”. Then save your changes. Take a look at what I’m talking about (click on the images of this article to enlarge them):

wlwjoomla-1

The next step is to enable the plug-in, as it is installed de-activated by default. First go to Extensions, Plug-In Manager from the top menu of the administrator page…

wlwjoomla-2

 

… filter by type,selecting “xmlrpc”…

wlwjoomla-3

… and click on the “XML-RPC – Movable Type API” item. The edit page for this plug-in appears. Make sure that the “Enabled” option on the left column is set to “Yes”. From the right column, you can configure the behaviour of the plug-in in order to suit your site. Some especially useful options are:

  • Single category mode. Set to “No” in order to be able to select any category from within Writer. This is highly recommended!
  • Storage path. This is where images from your articles will be saved. The default path, “images/stories/”, is a sane default.
  • File type. If you’ll be uploading funky formats, you may want to add them there, separated by commas.
  • User level. Here’s the real convenience of this solution! You can choose the minimum user level which is allowed to post and edit articles on your site. Web developers out there, you can set it to “Publisher or higher”, create a Publisher account for your client and let them add site content easily without worrying that they mess something up if you give them access to the back-end with a Manager or Administrator account. That’s what I call ultra useful.

Here’s a sample of a possible configuration:

wlwjoomla-4

After you’re done, save your changes and let’s configure our desktop client software, the Windows Live Writer.

Configuring Windows Live Writer for use with your site

Back to your desktop PC. If you haven’t done so yet, install Windows Live Writer, using the Windows Live Installer, available on-line from http://get.live.com. I will now demonstrate how to connect to your site. My WLW interface is in Greek, but I’ll translate for you. Please, bear with me.

Firing up WLW, it asks you to create a blog account. Even if your site is not a blog, this is the procedure to use. Remember, for all WLW cares, any site with a compatible XML-RPC protocol is a “blog”…

WLW will ask you which blogging service you’d like to use. Select the last option, “Other blogging service”

wlwjoomla-5

In the next dialog, enter the URL of your site, e.g. http://www.example.com and your username and password for the Joomla! user who has adequate privileges to access the site through XML-RPC (see the last paragraphs of the previous section for more information).

wlwjoomla-6

Since WLW is unable to automatically identify the XML-RPC services URL of Joomla!, it will pop a dialog like the one depicted below. You have to make the following choices:

  • Choose “Movable Type” as the blog type
  • For the URL, enter http://www.example.com/xmlrpc/index.php, substituting www.example.com with the URL to your own site.

wlwjoomla-7

If all goes well, WLW will start figuring out things about your site and probably ask you if you want it to try to download your blog’s theme. Just click on Yes and let it work for a few moments…

wlwjoomla-8

And, yes, it’s done! Just enter a descriptive name for your site in the text box – when you’ll be managing a dozen sites it’ll be good to make it easy which site is which – and you’re done.

wlwjoomla-9    

 

 

 

Just take your time and play with Windows Live Writer. I’m sure you’ll love it!

Last modified on Sunday, 15 August 2010 12:41
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12 comments

  • Comment Link Sunil Sheoran Monday, 14 March 2011 11:29 posted by Sunil Sheoran

    Windows Live Writer is very easy and usable as it is. Does't need major changes.

  • Comment Link Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos Friday, 11 March 2011 00:55 posted by Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

    Hello Chris,

    I think you're over-exaggerating the facts here. The XML-RPC layer has been a very well known attack vector. XML-RPC is practically dead except for WordPress (which inherited it from its earlier incarnations as an attempt to provide compatibility with Moveable Type, the then-standard in blogging software) and the only actively developed software supporting it is WLW.

    That said, the bulk of content editing is actually writing the copy. Formatting and images are much easier to accomplish and with the large gamut of Joomla! content plugins we rarely have to do any actual HTML formatting except bold/italic/underline/headers any more. In that sense, all you need is a word processor which is able to output valid XHTML so that you can copy it to Joomla! when you're ready for publishing.

    And there is. Its name is OpenOffice.org Writer (or its successor, LibreOffice Writer).

    I never write my articles on-line. I *always* write them off-line, using OpenOffice.org Writer. When I'm ready to publish, I open my site's administrator, copy the text from the Writer and paste it to JCE. Ta-da! Ready. All I have to do is to link the occasional image. That's fairly trivial.

    Regarding your comments about Joomla! duying because XML-RPC was dropped, let's see around us. Drupal not only has no XML-RPC layer, it doesn't even have a WYSIWYG editor. Do you see Drupal being eclipsed? Nope. Only WordPress has a remote API. Out of the enterprise-grade CMS that I know of, only Umbraco has a a remoting API, using a custom Microsoft Office Word extension. The standard in CMS is to NOT have a remote API. Just because WordPress, a blogging software aimed at non-technical people and designed to administer only one VERY specific kind of content, has a remoting API it doesn't mean that everybody must have such an API. Put things into perspective, please :)

  • Comment Link CHRIS YATES Monday, 07 March 2011 21:55 posted by CHRIS YATES

    Nicholas,

    I just read through the above blog posting while doing one of those fruitless searches on how to get any offline writer to function with Joomla 1.6.

    Whilst I understand (ish) why the XMLRPC layer was stripped out of the code, the move has made Joomla even harder to work with.

    I preferred to work offline to develop content and post when ready from desktop, laptop on the move or indeed my iphone.

    Without the aforementioned layer its damned nearly impossible to do anything on the fly.

    It's all well and good to develop a new version of the software, but where is the commonsense in neutering it to the extent interoperablity is virtually nowhere to be seen?

    Interoperability with the likes of Live Writer and other similar offline editors is essential if Joomla is to remain a solution of choice for dynamic websites.

    It's all well and good for the Joomla Community to develop squillions of eye candy modules and plugins, but the ability to get timely content on the page in short order is the killer application that's missing.

    The sooner someone writes a component, module or plugin that says "hello world" to the devices we use in our daily lives the better.

    Without such connectivity with the "outside world" Joomla will die.

    Be Well,

    CHRIS

  • Comment Link Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos Sunday, 06 February 2011 01:14 posted by Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

    Yeah, sadly it's a dead project now. I hope MS will update their WLW page because now it implies that you can use it with Joomla!, which is no longer accurate.

  • Comment Link Sebastian Schwiebert Tuesday, 01 February 2011 19:41 posted by Sebastian Schwiebert

    I guess that not. Just downloaded it from the website you mentioned.

    Release Date: 16th April 2009
    Version: 2.3.3

  • Comment Link Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos Friday, 27 August 2010 14:46 posted by Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

    It's been a while since the last time I used it myself and I am not sure that the plugin I mention is still under active development :(

  • Comment Link Marthinus Thursday, 26 August 2010 14:42 posted by Marthinus

    Thanks a LOT for this. When I try to do this though I get a message stating it could connect, but that I have no active blog... hmmm... any ideas how to resolve this?

  • Comment Link Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos Sunday, 11 July 2010 15:49 posted by Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

    Russ, there is no native support for tagging in Joomla!. The closest thing is assigning categories. Unless someone builds a similar interface for K2, I don't see any way to tag articles from WLW.

  • Comment Link russ Saturday, 10 July 2010 10:22 posted by russ

    any advice of how to tag joomla posts with WLW and get them in a tag cloud?

  • Comment Link andre Tuesday, 29 June 2010 11:27 posted by andre

    500 internal server error

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