Blogging using Windows Live Writer in your Orchard CMS Blog

In the previous blog post we saw how easy is to create and setup your blog on the Orchard CMS.

Since most of the bloggers use third-party client apps for blogging, like Windows Live Writer, it is useful if your blog has ability to work with these client apps. The client apps use XML-RPC interface in order to have the ability to manage and publish blogs remotely.

What is interesting and very beautiful about Orchard is that it gives you out of the box the XML-RPC and Remote Publishing capability by simply enabling one feature in the Modules inside your Orchard CMS Administration Dashboard.

Go to the Administration Dashboard and click the Modules

On the page, you will see this:

As you can see, you already have 'Remote Blog Publishing' and 'XmlRpc' features for Content Publishing, but both are disabled by default. So, if you click Enable only on 'Remote Blog Publishing', you will see both of them enabled at once since they are dependant features. After you click Enable, if everything is Ok, the following message should be displayed:

So, now we have the featured enabled and ready... The next thing you need to do is to open Windows Live Writer.

First, open Windows Live Writer and in your Blog Accounts, click on 'Add blog account'

Then, chose 'Other services'

And after that, click on your Blog link in the Orchard website and copy the URL, my URL (on localhost development server) is: http://localhost:8191/blog

Then, add your login credentials you use to login in Orchard and click Next.

After that, if you have setup everything successfully, the Windows Live Writer will do the rest

Once it finishes, you will have window where you can specify the name of your blog you have just connected your Windows Live Writer to...

Then... you are done. You can see Windows Live Writer has detected the Orchard theme I am using

After you finish with the blog post, click on Publish and refresh the Blog page in your Orchard website

You see, we have the blog post directly posted from Windows Live Writer to my Orchard Blog.

I hope this was useful blog post.

Regards,
Hajan