Members of the Windows Live Writer team attended WordCamp Seattle on Sept 26, 2009. WordCamps are annual gatherings for learning about all things WordPress, hosted in various cities across the country. It’s a great way to learn more about WordPress and network with other WordPress users. The Writer team was there in force giving demos of Writer publishing to WordPress.  Many people aren’t aware of how well Live Writer works with WordPress. It gives users a completely WYSIWYG publishing experience and it makes publishing photos and video simple.

In preparation for the event, developer Brandon Turner created three new Live Writer plug-ins to use with WordPress blogs. These new plug-ins enable —comments management, custom fields, and blog title/tagline editor. If you are a blogger yourself, you might want to check these out.

Here is a quick overview of the plug-ins:

• The first plugin lets you change the title and tagline of your blog. Often times you have seen the default Just another Wordpress.com weblog. If you enter your Twitter username and click 'import from twitter' it will import a recent twitter status as your blog tagline. It will look for your most recent status that is not an @ reply and doesn't contain a link.

• The second plugin allows you to manage comments on your Wordpress blog from inside of Windows Live Writer. 'New' means that the comment has been posted but it is waiting for moderation. 'Approved' means the comment has been published and is visible to all users on your blog. 'Spam' are comments that have been detected as spam and are hidden from your blog. Clicking the words across the top will show you a list of comments in each of those sections.

• The, third plugin, called custom field plugin lets you add wordpress custom fields to your blog. This plugin shows up after you have clicked publish inside of Windows Live Writer. The first time you click publish once the plug in is installed it will ask you if you want to enable it. Click 'yes' when you see the dialog below.

Then the next dialog will show up. This will allow you to enter new custom fields for your blog. Enter the key/values for the custom field in the grid below. And when you are done you can close the dialog, it will save the custom fields to your blog. The next time you come back to this dialog, there will be links on the top with the keys you have entered in the past. This way, if you always insert the same custom fields, you will only have to enter them the first time. When selected on a custom field, you can click the checkbox. This will generate a snippet of PHP code which you can use in your Wordpress theme to display the custom field.

These plugins are available for use and further development (the linked DLL and Zip file contains all the new plug-ins)

Additionally there are many other Writer plugins available to do almost anything you can imagine.  Check out gallery.live.com for a list of free writer plugins.

Best,

Windows Live Writer team