I thought about just updating the previous , but since this is a fairly extensive update which offers additional information that may impact your decision to use the software, I felt it deserved its own post.

Thanks to , I was made aware of a great plugin that he wrote called that added some of the advanced HTML functionality I longed for — essentially, a replacement for HTML snippets and inserting HTML code blocks. After watching each of the screencasts I was definitely excited to get the plugin installed and start putting it through the paces.

However, while writing some blog entries for a few other blogs, some other quirks, specifically concerning the image handling, came up. But, before I get into that, there are a few more "Quick Pros" that I’d like to discuss about the software.

Quick Pros (for WordPress Users)

  • Create new posts or pages from Windows Live Writer
  • Specify a custom post slug
  • Manage your categories directly from WLW including creating new categories.
  • Create password protected entries

There’s one big but — it’s only available for WordPress blogs running version 2.2.x and above. So, if you’re running an older installation of WordPress, you won’t be able to take advantage of these new features without modifying your XMLRPC file.

Quick Cons (for Photo Bloggers)

  • Every photo will be given the same id (id="id"). Since only one ID with a specific name is allowed per page, it renders the code invalid.
  • When photos are uploaded via FTP, a new folder is created for each blog entry. [1]
  • Doesn’t use CSS shorthand for image border handling which quickly clutters up the code.

Essentially, this is quick snapshot of the code generated after posting my photo-laced blog entry:
wlw-images

Editing the entry in WordPress was not going to happen simply because I would have gone cross-eyed. Editing the entry in WLW yielded another problem, though — each time I switched to Layout view, the style updates made to the image files were lost. Basically, I had to switch back to code view, update the image style code, remove the IDs and update the entry while still in code view in order to get the images to take.

Quick Con (for Everyone)

  • There is no Find/Replace. There is a find function, however, you aren’t able to edit the entry while the window is open, so if you’re looking for a number of the same objects (for example, searching for every instance of id="id" to delete them), you need to find it, close the window, delete the reference (or edit it), then open up the Find window again, and repeat the process.

Even with these new problems popping up, I still don’t think I’ll be abandoning WLW any time soon. It’s still one of the best desktop blogging systems that I’ve come across in a long while and I do feel that the developers are actually listening to the users in order to improve the software. Plus, you can’t beat the price.

All of this said, I’m about to explore the plugin gallery one more time to see if there are any plugins I missed which would help with any of these issues.

Footnotes

1: Although, in some cases, having the extra folder created would be helpful, it would still be nice for a way to disable it. I prefer to have all my images in a single image folder and not need to remember which additional directory it was uploaded to in case I want to use it in a future entry.

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