Windows Live Writer and Drupal 6

These instructions are now outdated. I have moved the latest version of these instructions to our development site on Tribute Media. Please check them out there.

Using Drupal as a blogging platform is pretty powerful. The challenge is that many blogging tools, like Windows Live Writer, don't seem to support it very well. It was okay with support on Drupal 5, but then it got broken. A few people have found some ways to hack the Drupal core, but that is not reasonable.

So, we built a WLW Module for Drupal 6. It is in beta right now, but we have some cool things we are doing on it. If you have some features you want to see, let us know now while we are developing. If you run Drupal (or if I have built a site for you... which is done in Drupal), you can use this module to manage your blogging.

You'll need to go to http://drupal.org/project/wlw_blogapi and download the latest version of the module.  After you install it, you'll need to make sure that your permissions are set right for your user to access it and you'll need to make sure that the content types that you want to manage are set on www.example.com/admin/settings/blogapi.

Once you have configured your instance of Drupal to support Windows Live Writer, you'll need to download Live Writer from live.com. After you install it, you'll need to add a weblog account. Here are the steps you'll need to be able to manage your content types the way you want.

Step 1

Select "another weblog service".

Step 2

Add your homepage url like this. Your username and password... make sure that you have rights to manage content from Drupal.

Step 3

Since WLW is not designed to manage Drupal in this way, you'll need to choose something else. We designed this to work with the Movable Type API. Enter your xmlrpc.php path. Unless you have changed your Drupal instance, it will be the same as mine below.

Step 4

You should have the option to select the content types that you are authorized to manage. If you don't see your content type, then you should check your Drupal installation and make sure that you are set with the right permissions.

Step 5

WLW will ask to detect your weblog settings. On the current version of the module, this does not work, so you'll have to select no.

Step 6

Your weblog configuration is complete and now you can use WLW to add this content type. You can change the weblog name to anything you like (you could change it to the blog name and content type if you like)

Step 7

If you want to manage another content type, just go through the same process but select a different type in step 4.

Future

We want this to be a fully featured option for Windows Live Writer and Drupal 6, so there are a few things that we are going to add to make this more viable. If you have other ideas, please let me know. Here are some features we want to add.

• Keywords field will apply to meta tags if you have the nodewords module installed
• If you have taxonomy configured, you'll be able to add categories to the vocabulary
• You'll be able to apply a custom URL alias is the path module is turned on
• You'll be able to have it default to a menu location. This way, if you are adding many pages, you can just go to your menu configuration and organize them.
• The theme detection will work. Currently works in Drupal 5, but does not work in Drupal 6.

As we add these features, we'll update these instructions.