Using Windows Live Writer as a web site content editor.

Question

What are your thoughts on using Windows Live Writer communicating with your website as the content editing system?

Windows Live Writer supports multiple category blogs (i.e. can be news, articles, and blogs), multiple category pages, tagging, XHTML WYSIWYG editing, image and file uploading via services or ftp, and the client has a "Insert HTML" plug-in library with a lot of already developed plug-ins for popular sites.

The trickiest part is implementing all of the XmlRpc methods in your services, but some digging with Reflector has exposed them as being pretty simple to implement the features.

Answer 1

I've considered it, but it's kind of like putting a triangle into a round hole. It will fit, but not quite right. Since the primary focus is around blogging, the page editing would be counter intuitive if you presented to someone as a page editor.

Answer 2

Well in the case where a web site's normal update pattern is to post new "news" a.k.a. blog posts, the page editing then becomes secondary to update the static content.

Answer 3

I was thinking the exact same thing. Using Windows Live Writer or MS Word 2007 (it supports Atom Publishing as well) to edit web materials on a site would be awesome (in theory), right?

I tried looking into creating an AtomPub Server, (using Google Data API, Apache Abdera, or Project ROME), to create a simple atom publication server backend on Java Google App Engine. It would save entities and images into the GAE datastore. The saved data could be shown via a simple front end on the site. All editing would be done in MS Word.

But creating a custom Atom pub server turned out overwhelmingly hard for me. I'll throw in the towel for now, at least for the AtomPub protocol. Something dead-simple like a CRUD entity interface might still be possible for Windows Live Writer, as it supports simpler protocols.

As far as I know, it hasn't been done for GAE. Umbraco ASP.net CMS supports it though.