This is a test to write a blog post from Windows Live Writer (WLW) on Windows 7. It’s a visual editor offering a valid What You Type Is What You Get environment.
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Windows Live Writer is a visual editor to compose your blog post for WordPress (and other systems) |
It’s very hard to write a post in WordPress using either its visual editor or its HTML editor.
The newcomers to WordPress are always very frustrated. They try to use Word and copy and paste into the WordPress visual editor. They screams at the results and updating the text inside WordPress become too challenging for them. WordPress HTML editor is a no man’s land for them as they are not prepared to learn any concept of HTML or CSS. However new users still want to put pictures, change fonts, embed videos, share on Facebook, etc.
This why I am evaluating WLW here.
Annoying with WLW : The cursor tends to disappear randomly and do not appear at all when you double click somewhere. Maybe a preference somewhere.. or a bug.
The fact you can see the source code on WLW is very handy, however it would have been nice to have the html code highlighted in color in the source pane view.
Also it would have been terrific if the cursor stayed at the same place when you switch from Edit to Source (At least when I highlight a piece of text or code).
Let’s add a picture :
Hum.. I have trouble to add a caption without going to the Source pane. The best way seems to insert a table with the picture on top and the caption below. Then you have full control of the caption (characters, color, extra links, favicons, etc.). As the captions are very important in blog posts (SEO, the readers read them first), it’s important to have full control on them.
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Peugeot 3008 advert in London (Ealing) on 14 May 2011. |
Cool 
(I love emoticons)
Let’s insert a table :
| The table | is good | But you |
| have | to specify | the width |
| in pixels | instead of | % |
| but you can | always modify the | code.. so I guess |
| it’s cool! |  |
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Let’s insert a you tube video :
It’s the only editor where you can compose your blog in a natural way and yet keep its full control. The preview is accurate which is not the case on WordPress itself (a preview do not show embed code up until you publish the post).
Now, yes the html code generated by WLW is not academic (e.g.: use of font tag instead of CSS equivalent) and not optimized. Some would say it’s heavy, ugly and inefficient but if you’re looking for lean, elegant and efficient code, be prepared to code it yourself by hand.
Also I am not talking about the html you see in the WLW source pane, I am talking about the HTML code you can see on WordPress HTML editor.
Going back and forth from WordPress to WLW require practice and caution but as the post are saved in the versioning system of WordPress, mistakes can easily be recovered. So it’s still possible to compose on WLW and do some edits on the WordPress side.
But as soon as you see the WLW HTML it’s difficult to urge yourself of not correcting it. Also it’s strongly advised to deactivate the WordPress Visual Editor (in your WordPress admin/Users/Preferences) . Anyways, I think the visual editor was a bad idea since WordPress 0.
However the pleasure to compose a blog post in a very close What You Type Is What You Get environment really worth that trouble (and probably the ones I haven’t seen yet).
It’s certainly the best current editor accessible for newcomers.
That’s it for this review. It’s a shame such tool doesn’t exist for Mac OS X.
We’ll do an update after few more blog posts.
Thanks for reading,
Take care.