A feature in Writer that not everyone knows about (yet :) ) is it's support for publishing pages. This support is (to my knowledge) currently limited to Wordpress and Typepad. Writer does use the Wordpress API for publishing pages, so any other providers out there that would like to add support just need to implement the page portion of the API and then use the Writer Provider API to notify Writer that pages are supported.
If you are using Wordpress or Typepad today, you are in luck- here is a quick tour of pages in Windows Live Writer.
New
The option for creating a new page is available. You can find the option in the File menu or as a drop down on the 'New' button.
Open
The option to open existing pages is also available in the Open dialog. Use the radio button at the top to select 'Pages' and you will be shown a list of pages that you can open.
Editing
The editing experience using Writer is pretty much identical. Writer has applied my template to the editing experience, so I am presented with a great WYSIWYG editing experience. I can use all the standard Writer features when editing a page.
One thing that is different when editing is the set of options in the property shelf at the bottom of Writer's main window. Instead of being presented with the categories associated with the post and with a publish date, I am instead presented with the following:
This lets me see any other pages and set this page as a child of one of the other pages. The page order does just what you would expect. While this is pretty rudimentary, it is also pretty darn simple and effective when using pages as a compliment to your existing weblog.
Publishing
Press the publish button.
Yep, it is that easy :)
Wow - I missed this completely in WLW. Thanks for sharing the info with us out here.
Posted by: WindowsObserver | December 13, 2007 at 07:17 PM
That's cool. WLW has a good track record for creating minimal HTML garbage and not munging any hand-edits ... so ...
obviously a UI like this would be nice to manage backend CMS content. I'd want to map "Web2.0 tags" to CMS categories by which I could browse and search ... then edit if I'm allowed. Letting users cut and paste while stripping out the usual garbage like "magic quotes" would be sweet.
Posted by: Scott Fitchet | December 15, 2007 at 10:32 PM
Well, I actually think that would be awesome too. Over the last couple of betas, we've been investing time and effort in making Writer support the Atom Publishing Protocol. While APP isn't really used that much right now (esp. when compared with Metaweblog API), it does provide a publishing API that is more general, less specifically applicable to blogging and more generally applicable to publishing whatever.
Throw an ATOM Publishing Protocol API on top of a content management system, and Writer should be a great client for it. There are a few details left to work out, but we'd love to have a working CMS with Atom support to work with, so if you're in the mood, drop me a line!
Posted by: Charles Teague | December 15, 2007 at 11:03 PM