Quite sometime back I had a email conversation with few of the core developers from the Windows Live Writer team. I had sent them a Windows Live Writer wish list which listed some features that I felt were required in WLW. Thanks to Brandon who caught my tweet and offered to listen to my needs, and Joe Cheng from the WLW team for listening to the requests, some of the features are now available as WLW plugins.
Also Read: Ultimate List of Windows Live Writer Tips & Tricks
The WLW team has announced a new plugin which adds new features to WLW, namely:
- A plugin to moderate new comments on your blog (Approve/Spam/Delete, no replies yet)
- A plugin to add custom fields to your blog post (#awesomeness).
- A plugin to update your blogs tagline.
Moderating Comments in Windows Live Writer
To moderate comments using Windows Live Writer, click on the Comment Management link in the sidebar, or go to Insert menu and select Comment Managementfrom the list. You will be promoted to enter the password for your blog, enter the password and choose if you want to save it for future use.
The plugin will fetch all the recent comments and display it to you, you can approve, spam or delete the comments. However, you will not be able to reply to them. You can also try out another Adobe Air based app to reply to moderate WordPress comments from your desktop.
Adding Custom Fields to WLW
One of the most wanted features for WLW has finally arrived, this was one of the reasons why I wrote the All in one SEO pack WLW bridge. With the help of this plugin, you can now add custom fields to the posts you write in WLW, saving you time and efforts to re-edit the posts in the admin interface, just to add custom fields.
To add custom fields to your post, you will have to first publish an article, before the article is actually published, you will be shown a dialog box to activate the custom fields plug-in for the blog.
Once you have activated the plugin, you will be shown a input box to enter the custom fields for the plugin. Once you have input the values, click on the Ok button to add the custom fields to your post.
The next time you publish an article, the custom fields input box will be automatically shown to you. This feature will definitely save several bloggers a lot of time.
Installing Plugin in WLW
To install the plugin download the WordPressPlugin.dll and add it to the your WLW plugins folder. The plugins folder could be located in either of the folders listed below, based on your installation.
- C:\Program Files\Windows Live Writer\Plugins
- C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins
Once again thanks to the WLW team for adding these features. We certainly look forward to seeing the rest of the things in our WLW wish list knocked off soon :-).
