I am not a huge fan of Microsoft even though I do make use of the company’s products regularly.  I have XP running on my Macbook Pro for browser testing.  I regularly make use of the Office suite.  I also have a few Microsoft games that I play on a regular basis.  The long and short is, I am a fan of open-source.

Yesterday was a strange day.  My brother Alec asked about online and offline HTML editors for Drupal and through the conversation it came out that he uses Live Writer for his personal blog.  Then later, at work, I was talking with a client who has a CMS that is really repository for Word docs.  There is the desire to move the content from these Word documents into Drupal without losing formatting.

FCKeditor was one option that came to mind.  It will allow you to cut and paste from Word.  This works fairly well.  It retains much of the formatting, but perhaps doesn’t quite echo the desktop experience that was desired.

Qumana comes a little closer.

I’ve used Qumana pretty heavily for offline editing and it does a poor job of translating the MS markup.  However, if you have any significant formatting, Drupal (using the full HTML filter) can display some pretty awful markup cruft.

So, I decided to take a closer look at Live Writer.  Unfortunately it is Windows only.  However, because I run parallels and have XP on the laptop, this didn’t pose a huge problem.

What I found, unsurprisingly, is that Live Writer does an excellent job of filtering out the strange MS markup prior to posting the content to the site.

Image placement using Windows Live Writer is a breeze.  The interface allows you to, easily, put margins around the image—something that is a little tougher in Qumana.  It allows you to add maps to a blog post extremely quickly and easily right in the interface.

Live Writer also really *feels* like a simple Office-like text editor.  It has an excellent preview feature at the bottom of the screen and it also allows you to look at the source.

Pros:

• It has a very slick, desktop feel for formatting
• It has lots of easy to access features for placing images, maps, links, video, and albums.
• It has an excellent preview feature
• The markup it generates is remarkably un-crufted

Cons:

• It is Windows only

As far as I can tell, that is the only downside.

Loading it up for Drupal

It wasn’t the easiest thing to set up for Drupal.  As I understand it, there were no issues in Drupal 5, but in Drupal 6 Live Writer can’t make out that Drupal is a CMS.  There are two ways to deal with this.  First off, you need to download the software.

1. Go to the Live Writer site. 
2. Click on the giant Download link. 
3. Click twice on the exe file.
4. I only chose to install Writer when given the options in a series of check boxes
5. Fire up Live Writer

The first method of dealing with Drupal was to “fool” Live Writer into thinking that my Drupal instance was WordPress rather than allowing it to auto-detect what CMS I was running.

1. Choose “Blogs” and then “Add Blog Account” in the top menu
2. Choose “Other Blog Service” and click “Next”
3. Enter your domain-but use something that forces the auto-detect to fail.  http://yourdomain/node/add/blog will likely work.  Then enter your username and password and click “Next”
4. Choose “WordPress” as your blog service and enter http://yourdomain/xmlrpc.php as your remote domain

You should be able to post to your blog at this point but won’t be able to post to any other content type.  If you want to be able to create content for other content types, there is a contributed module:  http://drupal.org/project/wlw_blogapi

For a very long time, I have done 90% of my blogging offline.  I do all my editing in an editor and then upload the content to one of several sites I regularly contribute to.  I think I’ve found a new offline editor.