In my previous post, I outlined my unsuccessful attempt to use windows live writer (WLW) to connect to the XmlRpc server of PhpWebsite‘s article manager module. I experimented using both the Metaweblog API and the Movable Type API but with no success. When attempting to post an entry, WLW always returned the following error message “The response to the metaWeblog.newPost method received from the weblog server was invalid: Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server.” However, the entry did get posted. Republishing the same entry would create a new post instead of replacing the one posted earlier. And each time, WLW gave the same error. 

I searched the Internet for possible solutions. I found out that the problem is quite common and not unique to PhpWebsite (PWS).  The same problem has also been observed in other blogging platforms such as wordpress. Luckily for wordpress users, there are already solutions posted in several blogs for some of the problems with WLW. Unfortunately for me, the solutions were not applicable for PWS. I could not even find other sites or blogs talking about PWS and WLW except this one. It seems I am the only soul trying to do this in the entire world wide web.

Since most of the websites I’m maintaining are powered by PWS, I thought it is worth the time and effort to figure out the cause of the problem. I am also in need of a good editing application that I can use with PWS. The provided text editor is only good for basic editing and not for more advanced formatting. For instance, using tables in entries can really take a lot of time. Anyway, since I am using WLW in my other blogs, I thought it would be great if I could also use it in my PWS-based websites.

(more…)

Anyone using Windows Live Writer (WLW) in PhpWebsite (PWS)? I searched the web but got no relevant result. I asked the question in phpwsforums, and am still waiting for replies.  So I tried it myself.

PWS has a third party module called article manager, which has an XML-RPC capability. This should enable PWS users to post entries to a PWS-based website with the article manager module installed using offline blogging tools such as WLW. But I wonder why nobody has tried doing this yet. So using a local test installation of PWS, I configured my WLW to connect to the article manager’s XML-RPC server. This can be done by simply pointing WLW to http://localhost/index.php?module=article&xmlrcp=1 (NOTE: replace "localhost" with the actual domain name of your PWS installation.) First, I used the metaweblog API.

(more…)