Ten days back Microsoft shocked the blogging world with their wonderful desktop blogging application, Windows Live writer. You can go through some great reviews by some great bloggers in the blogosphere. As a Windows user, I too was playing with this for the past 10 days to customize it for Wordpress and one thing I realized was it’s lack of support for tags. Windows Live Writer doesn’t have the support for tags by default but they have released an API by which you can extend the capabilities of Windows Live Writer.
I use Christine’s kickass Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for tags on my blog. Infact my theme, K2 comes prepackaged with support for UTW. So, this goes to all the K2 users using Windows Live Writer too. David Brunelle wrote how to make these two killer applications work together based on some existing hacks. His hack involves editing Wordpress xmlrpc.php to add Ultimate Tag Warrior functionality to Windows Live Writer and use its inbuilt keywords section to convert them to tags. This works, but I am not comfortable with the idea of editing any Wordpress files. No offence to David here but there is a simple way for adding tags using Ultimate Tag Warrior and Windows Live Writer.
- Go to Ultimate Tag Warrior options page and then check the box next to use embedded tags option.
- Write a post in Windows Live Writer and at the end of the post just use the following format to add tags to your post.
Here tag1, tag2, tag3 are the tags you want to add to the post you just created.
- Publish your post and Ultimate Tag Warrior adds those tags to your post automatically. That’s it.
No need of editing any Wordpress files. When you try to edit this post after publishing, you can still see the tags you added, if you want to change them. This method for Ultimate Tag Warrior works from any blogging application. I know some people will ask me, why should I type some extra words like [tag]..[/tags], when David’s idea lets me just type in my tags in the keywords section. I got an answer for that too. It involves Timheuer’s Tag4Writer plugin for Windows Live Writer where you can just click on insert tags and enter your tags. I will write about it in my next post.
Note: Thanks to Christine for suggesting this idea.
8 Comments so far.
It seems as though the embedded tags would be so much easier than editing xmlrpc.php! The fact is, when I figured out you could add tags to Ultimate Tag Warrior it was quite by accident, and I had already edited my xmlrpc.php file so the functionality would work with Ecto.
I’ll be paying attention to see how you’ve configured Tag4Writer to work with Ultimate Tag Warrior. I think I can see where you’re going (using the custom tag setting in Tag4Writer to specify tags be wrapped in [TAG][/TAG]?)
I’ll give it a try when I get home - because, as you mentioned, something about hacking Wordpress’s core files is a bit sketchy.
Ah, this is what I’ve been waiting for. I’ve been using Tim Heuer’s plugins since they came out, and was sorta disapointed that the tags4writer one didn’t really work with UTW. Now that you’ve shown the light, I’ll have to try it out on my next post. It’ll be much easier then publishing the post, then editing with the WordPress editor just to add the tags.
Thanks for the heads up!!
David: Yes, your guess is part of my solution.
Chris: Hold on, I will show you how to modify the tag4writer plugin to work with your site.
Oh, ok. I’m holding on. I thought from you post that it would just work. Did I miss read it?
HEHE Chris. It works perfect. Since ur using the tag4writer, I just said that I will let you know how to customize it.
Ah… I haven’t had a chance to try it out.
I use the Bunny’s Technorati Tags wordpress plugin, how would I either modify the application to work with it, or convert to using Ultimate Tag Warrior?
Simon, I am not sure if BTT plugin got an option for embedded tags. I will check in to it.
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