I buckled down and installed Windows Live Writer today. Sure, I’m happy enough with the default WordPress post editors (I like simple editors that don’t do too much and give me total HTML control), but decided it was time to try it out, since others seem to be using it successfully.
So, here it goes — a quick test of inserting a picture with a drop-shadow:
(Saving draft to blog, be right back…)
I’m actually impressed! It worked rather well. The fact that Live Writer uses my stylesheets in the post editor is quite nice. Two little quirks:
- The image successfully uploaded (to wp-content/uploads), which is very nice. I would prefer if it uploaded to a subdirectory (wp-content/uploads/images), but that can be configured by customizing the FTP configuration. Still, an option to upload images to a custom subdirectory would be nice.
- Though I saved this post as a draft, it is being seen as a post, and my drafts are empty. Another minor detail.
One thing that’s important to me is source formatting using SyntaxHighlighter from dreamprojections. Here’s a test of that…
public static void Main() { // just a test }
Well, the initial try didn’t work, thanks to HTML tags being inserted into the code. Can’t blame WLW for that. I could just edit the code in HTML view, which is fine for now. I may try a WLW plug-in for source editing, or maybe roll my own.
In the end, after a quick test, I have to say that I would use Windows Live Writer again. Hats off to Microsoft for coming up with this useful tool.