Blogging has become a very popular style of publishing information within companies. It is not a rare case at all to have a company that has several employees who publish posts on a regular basis.
The challenge of blogging
But do you want to give these users access to your entire content management system? Do they really want to deal with the complex structure of a CMS to do the simple task of posting a blog post? Probably not!
For that matter, why do you actually need to be online to write your posts? Wouldn’t it be nice to write and format blog posts while say, on a plane and then simply hit "post it" to your blog later?
I am not the only one asking these questions. As such, there are already multiple software solutions available that allow you to manage your blog from an offline application. To name a few - Bleezer, BlogDesk or Post2Blog and the one from Microsoft is called Windows Live Writer.
Kentico version 5.5 is now connects to Live Writer and as I've just experienced, this makes blogging a lot easier…
Setup and features
The setup is straight forward. You only need to download Live Writer, know the URL of your blog, your password and the URL of the blog API (a detailed setup description can be found in the Kentico Development Guide).
I was amazed at how simple it was. Create a new post with Live Writer, quickly save your work as you compose, insert images, hyperlinks or tables if necessary. There are some basic formatting options available: paragraph, six levels of headlines, ordered and unordered lists as well of course bold, italic, underline etc.. Nothing too fancy, but enough for the average blogger.
Basic formatting tools: Only advanced users will need more.
Another nice feature is that Live Writer downloads the CSS file or theme from your blog. This enables you to view exactly how your post will look on your site.
Live Writer also connects to your blog tag group, which allows you to easily select tags for your post. And of course you can set the publishing date.
Workflow
Live Writer works perfectly with the Kentico workflow. You can Save your post locally, post a draft to your blog, where it can then be published by someone else, or you can publish it directly from within Live Writer.
Images
Images can be pasted from your clipboard to Live Writer, where they can be resized, cropped and otherwise manipulated.
These images are then uploaded as document attachments. Kentico actually saves both versions: the smaller size that is used within your post and a full-size image which is shown when you click on the image.
Kentico saves two versions of each image: The image used in your blog and the original.
If you delete images from your post, after you have published it, Kentico will remove these images from the document attachments. Nice clean-up.
Trying to break it
As always, I tried to break it. Because if I don’t try to break it, my clients surely will!
This time I had little luck. You can compose a post in Live Writer, update it on the web site, go back and reload the post in Live Writer. It is simple and it works. Just make sure you always open up your post from your blog, otherwise you might upload a post twice.
When copy-pasting from a web site or a Word document, the code remained surprisingly clean!
Note: I have not tried to use Live Writer with a multi-lingual blog, but I guess there are not many of those around anyway.
Some Live Writer drawbacks
Now, if you are a SEO or formatting maniac on each and every post, you will find some drawbacks:
- Formatting: There is no menu that allows you to easily apply custom classes to your HTML tags. The CK Editor in Kentico does allow this. The good thing is, you can easily make changes to the source code and these edits will not be overwritten by the software.
- SEO: Live Writer has no place to enter your custom title or Meta tags. For your page title, Kentico will use your inherited page title and add your post headline (usually this will sufice for the original writer).
- Post Summary: Live Writer doesn’t support a post summary. Kentico will automatically create one with the first 200 characters (value can be changed in your CMS settings) of your blog post. If you however make changes to your first paragraph, the post summary is not updated.
Conclusion
The Kentico/Live Writer combination seems to offer cover the needs for an average blogger and can make their lives a lot easier. For one task or another, it may still be necessary to use the Kentico cmsdesk. However, for users that require for an easy-to-use tool, it is a perfect solution.
Now if I only could get that work on my iPhone…