Microsoft has announced back in January the 2009 Release Candidate for Windows Live Writer, but we’ve only just got around to retesting some of the bugs we had with the old release.

We’re really interested with how WLW interacts with the Blog software we deploy in for our client community solutions, namely:

• BlogEngine.NET
• Telligent Community
• WordPress
• Google’s Blogspot

Here’s a quick run-down of the new features and fixes we can now use.

Category and Tag

Prior versions of WLW allowed Category marking. Now Tags can also be added quickly against a post. There’s also a refresh indicator showing new tags being cached from your blog.

Once you’ve built a bunch of blog Tags these are now displayed inside a drop-down Tag cloud alongside your selected target blog.

Future Posting

Some of our clients providing daily news blogs particularly like the Publish fix. They can post final content for publishing upon a future set date and time. Click the drop-down arrow to display the calendar control. Click the required publish date – finally – make sure the Publish check-box is checked for your post to be automatically primed for automatic publishing. We’ve tested this across all our client platforms with success.

Summary

Windows Live Writer’s most impressive features remain its comprehensive image-management allowing simple image-formatting to create impressive design layout.

A good trick is the combining of features to create some interesting variations. For example, applying Instant Photo (similar to Polaroid), applying a copyright, right-margin 10px and throw in a Tilt effect to provide a clever design with quick point and click configuration.

Check out the full list of Windows Live Writer features here. Check out the latest Windows Live Writer Plug-ins here.

Windows Live Writer Windows Live Writer

Microsoft has announced back in January the 2009 Release Candidate for Windows Live Writer, but we’ve only just got around to retesting some of the bugs we had with the old release.

We’re really interested with how WLW interacts with the Blog software we deploy in for our client community solutions, namely:

• BlogEngine.NET
• Telligent Community
• WordPress
• Google’s Blogspot

Here’s a quick run-down of the new features and fixes we can now use.

Category and Tag

Prior versions of WLW allowed Category marking. Now Tags can also be added quickly against a post. There’s also a refresh indicator showing new tags being cached from your blog.

Once you’ve built a bunch of blog Tags these are now displayed inside a drop-down Tag cloud alongside your selected target blog.

Future Posting

Some of our clients providing daily news blogs particularly like the Publish fix. They can post final content for publishing upon a future set date and time. Click the drop-down arrow to display the calendar control. Click the required publish date – finally – make sure the Publish check-box is checked for your post to be automatically primed for automatic publishing. We’ve tested this across all our client platforms with success.

Summary

Windows Live Writer’s most impressive features remain its comprehensive image-management allowing simple image-formatting to create impressive design layout.

A good trick is the combining of features to create some interesting variations. For example, applying Instant Photo (similar to Polaroid), applying a copyright, right-margin 10px and throw in a Tilt effect to provide a clever design with quick point and click configuration.

Check out the full list of Windows Live Writer features here. Check out the latest Windows Live Writer Plug-ins here.

Windows Live Writer Windows Live Writer

This quick tutorial details how to configure Windows Live Writer to publish content to a CommunityServer Blog.

The following documentation is using Windows Live Writer v14.0.8050.1202 and CommunityServer 2008.5 SP1 (Build: 31106.3070)

1. Copy the URL of your Blog

CommunityServer supports multiple-blogs allowing each Blog to be either individually themed or be organized by content. For example, a dedicated Blog for all content about a specific subject or state location. A blog can be authored by a single user or multiple authors contributing to that single blog.

Copy the URL of the Blog to which you want to publish to clipboard. This demonstration uses CommunityServer News Blog as its example.

Here we’re copied our Blog URL to clipboard.

2. Start Windows Live Writer – Add a blog account

Start Windows Live Writer. Click the Blogs Menu, Add Blog Account. Paste the URL of your selected CommunityServer Blog into the Web address of your blog:

Enter your Username. Enter your password. Hit the checkbox to have Windows Live Writer store your password. Click Next.

Note: Configuring multiple Blog Accounts into Windows Live Writer means that your are almost guaranteed to accidentally post to the wrong Blog. One work-around option could be to uncheck “Remember my password” from one or more accounts to thereby double-check that you’re posting to the blog you think you’re posting to.

3. Select the Blog Service

Select “Other blog service” and click Next.

4. Configure for CommunityServer

Select CommunityServer from the Type of Blog Engine list.

Insert your site root URL into the Remote posting URL for your Blog. This replaces the string <your site> with your site URL.

5. Enter a Blog nickname

This identifies this specific Blog within Windows Live Writer. Enter your Blog nickname and click Next.

The current active Blog nickname is displayed on the right hand side of Windows Live Writer.

6. Create a Temporary Post

You can optionally allow Windows Live Writer to create a test post on your Blog. This is automatically deleted on success. Click Yes to create a temporary test post or No.

7. Theme Download

Windows Live Writer will attempt to download your default Blog theme. This means that your WLW post will render exactly as you live Blog. Theme download currently fails for CommunityServer. Works for BlogEngine.NET.

8. Additional Resources

Windows Live Writer offers a number of additional Plug-Ins which provide more functions inside WLW. We use and recommend the following:

• Insert CommunityServer Gallery Plug-in. Allows insert from the media gallery or the upload of an object to CommunityServer.
• Add Digg button to post. This can help your blog post get noticed on the Digg.com network.
• Check out all the other supported Plug-Ins.

9. No Forum Post Support!

Telligent CommunityServer doesn’t yet support Windows Live Writer post publishing to Forums. This is technically not that different from Blog publishing requiring some minor technical enhancement and perhaps the willingness to add the feature. Telligent still doesn’t seem to understand or appreciate the number of sites for whom Forum posting is more popular than Blog Posting. If we can any progress we’ll let you know on this blog.

Nick Harrington
team Ambay Software

Windows Live Writer Windows Live Writer

This quick tutorial details how to configure Windows Live Writer to publish content to a CommunityServer Blog.

The following documentation is using Windows Live Writer v14.0.8050.1202 and CommunityServer 2008.5 SP1 (Build: 31106.3070)

1. Copy the URL of your Blog

CommunityServer supports multiple-blogs allowing each Blog to be either individually themed or be organized by content. For example, a dedicated Blog for all content about a specific subject or state location. A blog can be authored by a single user or multiple authors contributing to that single blog.

Copy the URL of the Blog to which you want to publish to clipboard. This demonstration uses CommunityServer News Blog as its example.

Here we’re copied our Blog URL to clipboard.

2. Start Windows Live Writer – Add a blog account

Start Windows Live Writer. Click the Blogs Menu, Add Blog Account. Paste the URL of your selected CommunityServer Blog into the Web address of your blog:

Enter your Username. Enter your password. Hit the checkbox to have Windows Live Writer store your password. Click Next.

Note: Configuring multiple Blog Accounts into Windows Live Writer means that your are almost guaranteed to accidentally post to the wrong Blog. One work-around option could be to uncheck “Remember my password” from one or more accounts to thereby double-check that you’re posting to the blog you think you’re posting to.

3. Select the Blog Service

Select “Other blog service” and click Next.

4. Configure for CommunityServer

Select CommunityServer from the Type of Blog Engine list.

Insert your site root URL into the Remote posting URL for your Blog. This replaces the string <your site> with your site URL.

5. Enter a Blog nickname

This identifies this specific Blog within Windows Live Writer. Enter your Blog nickname and click Next.

The current active Blog nickname is displayed on the right hand side of Windows Live Writer.

6. Create a Temporary Post

You can optionally allow Windows Live Writer to create a test post on your Blog. This is automatically deleted on success. Click Yes to create a temporary test post or No.

7. Theme Download

Windows Live Writer will attempt to download your default Blog theme. This means that your WLW post will render exactly as you live Blog. Theme download currently fails for CommunityServer. Works for BlogEngine.NET.

8. Additional Resources

Windows Live Writer offers a number of additional Plug-Ins which provide more functions inside WLW. We use and recommend the following:

• Insert CommunityServer Gallery Plug-in. Allows insert from the media gallery or the upload of an object to CommunityServer.
• Add Digg button to post. This can help your blog post get noticed on the Digg.com network.
• Check out all the other supported Plug-Ins.

9. No Forum Post Support!

Telligent CommunityServer doesn’t yet support Windows Live Writer post publishing to Forums. This is technically not that different from Blog publishing requiring some minor technical enhancement and perhaps the willingness to add the feature. Telligent still doesn’t seem to understand or appreciate the number of sites for whom Forum posting is more popular than Blog Posting. If we can any progress we’ll let you know on this blog.

Nick Harrington
team Ambay Software

Windows Live Writer Windows Live Writer

One key measure for the popularity of a product is how the community invests its own resource and effort to create new Themes and Styles. This is certainly true for blogging platforms like WordPress boasting 540 Themes (here), Joomla offering free-to-download (some here), Google Blogger with hundreds (here, here and here).

Been sometime since we looked back at Telligent’s Graffiti CMS, but they also have some good looking sites being customized by users. I do have some question marks about if customers will want to pay $99 for a Blog platform when so many (equally good or much better) products exist. In these economic times many bloggers, be they enthusiast or professional will think twice about spending cash. However, I even found Graffiti CMS Themes here.

BlogEngine.NET is starting to show the same street-credibility with 50+ (free) excellent styles available also with the recent release of a custom Theme Pack pulled together by Janko.

Ambay Software are trying to keep up with the excellent raft of sample themes are maintaining a demo area of all the Themes we see released. OK, we might not get a new one uploaded on the day, but once we know, we do our best to make it available!

You can visit our demo BlogEngine.NET theme library here.

Forum Software

It is with some confusion why Telligent CommunityServer continues to ignore the importance of providing some better Theme samples. Even a small collection allows the amateur-developer to at least pick an approximate style and then customize to something close to their own look and feel. This remains an obvious real drawback to choosing CommunityServer over other Forum products.

This is an obvious real drawback for customers selecting CommunityServer.

Of course Ambay Software do help customers tailor their own CommunityServer theme, but even we recognize some organizations, charity or community-site, just don’t have the resource to purchase even a few days Theme work.

Nick Harrington
team ambay software

BlogEngine.NET, Windows Live Writer BlogEngine.NET, Windows Live Writer

One key measure for the popularity of a product is how the community invests its own resource and effort to create new Themes and Styles. This is certainly true for blogging platforms like WordPress boasting 540 Themes (here), Joomla offering free-to-download (some here), Google Blogger with hundreds (here, here and here).

Been sometime since we looked back at Telligent’s Graffiti CMS, but they also have some good looking sites being customized by users. I do have some question marks about if customers will want to pay $99 for a Blog platform when so many (equally good or much better) products exist. In these economic times many bloggers, be they enthusiast or professional will think twice about spending cash. However, I even found Graffiti CMS Themes here.

BlogEngine.NET is starting to show the same street-credibility with 50+ (free) excellent styles available also with the recent release of a custom Theme Pack pulled together by Janko.

Ambay Software are trying to keep up with the excellent raft of sample themes are maintaining a demo area of all the Themes we see released. OK, we might not get a new one uploaded on the day, but once we know, we do our best to make it available!

You can visit our demo BlogEngine.NET theme library here.

Forum Software

It is with some confusion why Telligent CommunityServer continues to ignore the importance of providing some better Theme samples. Even a small collection allows the amateur-developer to at least pick an approximate style and then customize to something close to their own look and feel. This remains an obvious real drawback to choosing CommunityServer over other Forum products.

This is an obvious real drawback for customers selecting CommunityServer.

Of course Ambay Software do help customers tailor their own CommunityServer theme, but even we recognize some organizations, charity or community-site, just don’t have the resource to purchase even a few days Theme work.

Nick Harrington
team ambay software

BlogEngine.NET, Windows Live Writer BlogEngine.NET, Windows Live Writer