This thread by rokinthesix at the BlogEngine.NET forums was one of a number asking about different editors for BlogEngine.NET including the option of using Microsoft Windows Live Writer for posting into BlogEngine.NET (and also for posting into CommunityServer). More on this below.

Certainly we got the general impression that while third-party local editors seemed to do a good job, this removed the (pressure? or) need for BlogEngine.NET to offer alternative and better editors.

More and more customers are managing their office using software-as-a-service hosted applications. This offers the “road-warrior” real flexibility to manage their stuff from any web-browser anywhere. Highly unlikely that your browser device (such as this TabletKiosk UMPC) or netbook wants to be loaded up with all the developer applications you would find on a developers rig.

Business owners, sales or support staff need access to a one-stop-shop for post creation including better options for save-draft and post-formation. We certainly do.  

This is the current BlogEngine.NET Post Editor, not too bad, but missing options to link images and insert media objects. Developers should not design Editors. Bloggers are the real experts everyday keying around the limitations of a Blog Post editor.

Our BlogEngine.NET customers have noted that the default editor didn’t offer any advanced editing capability. The regular and repeated complaints were:

1. No easy way to link images stored on a different site (such as someone elses site or Flickr) without doing some HTML coding.
2. No way to format images for text-wrap around the image. The editor simply offered left, center, right.
3. Embedding movies from Yahoo, LiveLeak, etc. wasn’t possible. YouTube worked.

By comparison CommunityServer have a pretty good choice of Forum and Post Editors supporting simple Plain Text, Standard and Enhanced functions. The more experienced a user becomes, the more they can make posts more formatted. Here the CommunityServer Editors:

Plain text: doesn’t offer a toolbar – a safer option for some users.

Standard Editor:  

Enhanced Editor:  

So, that’s our conclusion – BlogEngine.NET must provide the option for enhanced editors out-of-the-box.

More about Microsoft WLW

Windows Live Writer offers a bunch of excellent post creation tools addressing some of the BlogEngine.NET editor shortfalls. There are some brilliant image-management options for giving your images a touch of glamour. For example, this snapshot of Live Writer shows off a reflection effect. Others image styles include Instant Photo (a cool Polaroid), PhotoPaper, Borders as well as Watermark, Sepia, Gaussian Blur and more.

Plug-ins are function extensions and are an interesting direction for Windows Live Writer. Developers and software / service vendors can offer Extensions that integrate their content through WLW into your Blog post. WLW already has 6-pages of Plug-ins including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Silverlight, Pic from CommunityServer and Digg.

This post was generated using Windows Live Writer. Good, isn’t it.

Nick Harrington
team ambay software

Known issues:

• BlogEngine.NET Forum users ckincincy posted (here) a fix for an advance posting bug. This is the option to set the publish date to a future date/time.

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