Moderate Comments and Add Custom Fields in Windows Live Writer

Keith Dsouza — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:30:00 +0000

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 :-).

TAGS: Windows Live Writer, WLW, WordPress Tips and Tricks

Moderate Comments and Add Custom Fields in Windows Live Writer originally appeared on Techie Buzz written by Keith Dsouza on Tuesday 20th October 2009 04:30:00 AM under Featured Articles. Please read the Terms of Use for fair usage guidance.

All In One SEO Pack Bridge for WLW Plugin Release

Keith Dsouza — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 03:29:24 +0000

I love using Windows Live Writer and don’t use the WordPress admin dashboard to write posts, however I also make use of the All In One SEO Pack plugin, which allows users to tweak the title of a post, and add keywords and description to it.

However WLW does not have options to add additional fields to the post, so I have to manually go in and edit the posts when I want to customize the title or keywords for SEO optimization once I have published the post.

And I am pretty sure many other bloggers who use WLW and SEO Pack may be facing the same problems, this new plugin I created aims to do away with that issue, allowing users to specify the SEO Title, keywords and description from within Windows Live Writer interface.

Yes you heard it right, the All In One SEO Pack Bridge for WLW allows bloggers to specify the SEO title, keywords and description while composing posts from WLW.

This plugin is basically made up of two components, one is a WordPress plugin which you will need to install on the your WordPress blog, and another is a Windows Live Writer plugin which will allow you to add SEO details while creating or editing a post.

How To Use the All in One SEO Pack Bridge for WLW

The most important thing is to first install the WordPress plugin and activate it on your blog, this plugin is responsible for adding the All in One SEO Pack parameters to the database, which will then be used by the All in One SEO Pack plugin to optimize your titles and add keywords and description to the post.

Once you have installed the WordPress plugin, download the WLW plugin available as a DLL file (no installer available for this release, may add it in future releases) and drop it into the Plugins folder in WLW directory.

Adding SEO parameters to the post is fairly simple, however due to a issue I have with entering html comments while in edit mode, adding and deleting those parameters are slightly different (and I hope to improve them in future, any WLW plugin developers help will be appreciated here).

To add the SEO parameters from WLW, first select the source view or use the Shift + F11 shortcut key, once you are in source code view, place your cursor at the end of the post and select Add SEO Information from the Insert menu or from the sidebar. Doing this in source view is of utmost importance, or else the SEO parameters will not be added to the post.

A new window will popup asking you for the SEO parameters, input them and hit enter, it is not necessary to add all the parameters, just add those that you require.

If you want to edit the SEO parameters you will have to first delete them from the HTML source, look for the HTML comments that looks similar to the code snippet below.

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