As a Freelancer I have been using Joomla! since not long after it was first released. I adore it, it does everything I could possibly want of a CMS. Any of you who haven’t yet heard of this wonderful bit of software and who are thinking of either publishing or upgrading a pre-existing website should seriously take a look and put some research into it. Go to Joomla!.org to find further information.

A Joomla! administrator has the ability to be able to add extra bits and bobs into the system, either in the form of Components, Plugin’s or Modules. I’ll cover the differences between these in another article. The point is you can add cool stuff to both the frontend, the actual pages that people see when they browse through your site, and the backend, the administration end of your website that the general public don’t see. Up until today I have always installed and used one or two WYSIWYG editors into the system, making Joomla! a more pleasant place altogether to write articles.

But today I have discovered and started using MovableType XML-RPC Plugin from Joomler!.net. What an awesome plugin! I can now create content without opening the backend of my site at all. I know this doesn’t seem like a major issue, and to tell you the truth it really isn’t. But I have never felt totally at home using the backend editors in Joomla! it all just seemed a little bit sluggish. Yes, that sounds like a lame excuse, but really I don’t need to have an excuse. The fact is it’s cool to be able to write content offline and then have it uploaded to the site with just a push of a button.

This article is about using Windows Live Writer in conjunction with the Joomla! MovableType XML-RPC Plugin. All the software used is provided free, at no cost. I can just hear all you diehards moaning about using a Windows based editor. I’ll have to hang my head in shame this time, but rest assured I’m going to be playing with my Linux installation shortly, finding ways to do the same thing using different software. I’ll keep you updated.

If you have never encountered Windows Live Writer before and would like to find out more, head over to Introducing Windows Live Writer. That will give you all the information you need, but in short:

From the site: “Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service.”

Firstly you need to enable your Joomla! site to accept the articles that you’ll be uploading via Windows Live Writer. We do this by downloading the MovableType XML-RPC Plugin and installing it into our Joomla! System. Do this in the standard way Extensions->Install/Uninstall, browse for the file and click the upload file and install.

Now go to Extensions->Plugin Manager and enable the XML-RPC - MovableType API plugin. I then clicked on XML-RPC - MovableType API and edited the Parameters. I changed my Default Category to the category I wanted my articles to automatically get published to. I changed the Storage Path to the path where I store the images relating to the articles in that particular category. I then added my username to the For Author or Registered Access list. I’m not sure if that was necessary but it works so I’m happy with it. Save the changes and go to Site->Global Configuration->System, in the System Settings section make sure that Enable Web Services is set to Yes. We’ve now completed the Joomla! side of the setup.

The setup of Windows Live Writer is relatively straight forward. If you haven’t installed it yet, go ahead and do so. Open Windows Live Writer and create a new account. Select Other Blog Service. In the Web Address of your Blog: enter your domain and add /xmlrpc/index.php for example http://www.mydomain.com/xmlrpc/index.php now enter the username and password that you use to edit/add articles in your website with. This doesn’t necessarily have to be an admin, it can be any username with author privileges, though an admin may have to publish the articles unless Allow auto publish is enabled in the Joomla! MovableType XML-RPC Plugin.

Windows Live Writer will now complete the rest of the setup automatically. My setup had an error whilst trying to enable the sites template, but it has caused no problems and I’m sure it could be solved with a little tinkering. At the moment I’m just tremendously happy that I could write this entire article offline, yes, little things please little minds.