I’ve installed Windows Live Writer and noticed that it is quite extensible. In fact, all of it’s extensibility features are documented on MSDN.

The really nice feature that got me hooked is the support for editing ‘inside the theme’ (for the lack of a better description). The way this works is, there’s a small contract between Windows Live Writer and the blog, where the blog can provide views that Windows Live Writer fetches for editing.

So a nice suggestion for those working with blog support for Plone: please implement Windows Live Writer’s Provider Customization API.

And then, there’s another great feature that Plone can exploit, but this one I would like to implement myself. Windows Live Writer supports Content Source Plugins, which basically allow you to pop up a form for some user interaction and then spit out some HTML to be inserted at cursor location in the blog entry.

Now, if you stop and think just for a second, we already have a concept of “Content Source” in Plone: Kupu’s Image and Link Libraries. It already has a well-defined XML format. It can be customized through the Plone UI. And to top it off there are examples of writing Content Source Plugins that read data from an XML source. It should be a piece of cake to implement a “Kupu drawer”-like Content Source Plugin for Windows Live Writer that reuses the data from Kupu.

So, that was it. Hopefully someone will take those ideas to the next level and implement something soon. Unfortunately I’m a little busy with graduation and all that at the moment, so I can only provide ideas. But maybe next year. :)

Why you ask, since we have Plone. Well, nothing special. Just that
I wanted to avoid the temptation to keep tweaking my
wires-and-bubble-gum blog installation on top of a really old Plone
installation and have something that would just work.

So, if you’re in a similar situation and want to give WordPress a try,
here’s the script I used to exporting my blog entries in the Movable
Type export format for importing into WordPress. It should export
categories and comments and everything in the proper format. It worked
for me didn’t it? :O)

## Script (Python) "mtexport"
##bind container=container
##bind context=context
##bind namespace=
##bind script=script
##bind subpath=traverse_subpath
##parameters=
##title=
##
out = context.REQUEST.RESPONSE
sort_modified = context.sort_modified_ascending
get_discussion = context.portal_discussion.getDiscussionFor
reply_replies = context.getReplyReplies
a_dict = {}

def spit_comments(comments, out):
      im_in_sub = False
      for comment in comments:
         if same_type(comment, a_dict):
           im_in_sub = True
           comment = comment['object']
         print >> out, 'COMMENT:'
         print >> out, 'AUTHOR:', comment.Creator()
         print >> out, 'DATE:', comment.created().strftime('%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S')
         print >> out, '<strong>', comment.Title(), '</strong>', '<br>'
         print >> out, comment.CookedBody()
         print >> out, '-' * 5
         if not im_in_sub:
            spit_comments(reply_replies(comment), out)
      null = printed

for entry in context.blog.objectValues():
   print >> out, 'TITLE:', entry.Title()
   print >> out, 'AUTHOR:', 'sidnei'
   print >> out, 'DATE:', entry.created().strftime('%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S')
   print >> out, 'STATUS:', 'publish'
   print >> out, 'ALLOW COMMENTS:', '1'
   print >> out, 'ALLOW PINGS:', '1'
   print >> out, 'CONVERT BREAKS:', '0'
   cats = entry.Subject()
   if cats and cats[0].strip():
      print >> out, 'PRIMARY CATEGORY:', cats[0]
   for cat in cats[1:]:
      if cat.strip():
         print >> out, 'CATEGORY:', cat
   print >> out, '-' * 5
   print >> out, 'BODY:'
   print >> out, entry.CookedBody()
   comments = sort_modified(get_discussion(entry).getReplies())
   if comments:
      print >> out, '-' * 5
      spit_comments(comments, out)

   print >> out, '-' * 8

null = printed
return out

So if you succesfully use that, drop me a note.