Thread

I’ve spent the last few months working with a developer who is totally rewriting his desktop blogging application for PC and Windows.

So far, he has got it “point and click” accepting EE’s Metaweblog API—and we’ve sorted out a lot of the initial bugs.

As far as EE users are concerned, what would you like to see available?

We’ve already got “snippets”, “categories”, “tags”, a local database to download your site into, hotlinking, drafts, related posts, update/edit posts .. plus the usual FTP, image upload etc ..

and he’s developing a local template so you can simply preview your post in the site_css.

It has both a plain text and basic HTML editor .. and we’re looking at an advanced HTML editor into which you can write/insert your own classes and id’s ..

If you have any thoughts on what you would like, please post them here and I’ll pass them on.

If you are interested in alpha testing, please PM me with your email and I’ll pass it along.

Yes .. I know there are a lot of desktop blogging tools out there—some of them free (this one won’t be) .. and I’ve tried every one of them with varying degrees of success.

This is the first one where I was able to get specific answers for EE .. so it might be of interest for a lot of designers/developers .. especially as an alternative to a SAEF ..

Anything for us Poor Mac users?

Sounds interesting this one just wish it was for Mac though.

Good luck with it all.

Best wishes,

Mark

This sounds nice, and I don’t mind paying for something that does exactly what I want it to. Right now, I’m using Windows Live Writer and I like it a lot. Two major faults though:

1) Image uploading is strange, or I haven’t quite figured it out. It wants to create its own directories, or append a bunch of text to the file name. I want to specify an upload directory and to keep the file name exactly like it is on my PC.

2) It does not enter linefeeds into the posted HTML (that I see in the EE textbox). That means that I have to manually locate every </p> and put in linefeeds using Notepad++. I do this not because it affects the display of the post, but because it makes it much easier for me to edit a post later.

#2 may be due to WLW using Windows linefeeds, but I don’t know that we ever figured that out for sure. So, maybe there should be an option to specify the OS of your host?

I’m not too interested in trying out an alpha product, but please let me know when it is in beta or RC. Also, given that it will be a for-pay product, I hope that there will be a 30-day (even a 3-day) trial.

@ Mark : there are a number of Mac interfaces out there and there are a number of threads here on the Forum and the KB about this; my issue was that there was nothing for us poor PC users. There is a shiny new release of Ecto that I know about ..

@ Tim : It’ll be a 30 day trial probably; there is no point giving a URL to the old one so you can try it because its so far out of date that it doesn’t do anything with EE (at least in my experience)

One of the things I was looking for was that the application should allow me to build/modify/grow my site on a local machine and then be able to plug all of my entries into the EE Server installation.

Having a local copy of every entry was important because the nature of what I’m writing necessitates me being able to cross-reference posts to define/elaborate/expand on different concepts/terms/ideas as I build the site .. and then simply upload the edited posts; this works out a lot simpler (and quicker) than Stand_Alone_Entry/Edit_Forms. A local installation was not an option because of this factor

I also wanted to work with multiple sites and be able to cross-reference in the body.

What I was looking for was something that combined all of the features of Ecto, LiveWriter and RocketPost (in particular) with a simple interface and a decent HTML editor (along with WYSIWYG) .. and this software author has been quite happy to work towards accomodating my requests so far ..

even to the point of asking if there are any more possible features that a CMS maintainer/developer/editor could use.

What would be cool is if we could “expand” the software.

Cause you now support tags and such…
But what if i have a custom Tab like: objects.
And in a regular entry form they would show up and ready to be filled in.

Would be cool if developers can make a .xml orso with instructions on how to add “tabS” 😊

I’ll talk to the Author about this because I would like it too ... however, the limitation at the moment is the number of fields available in the Metaweblog_API.

Now .. if there was a custom EE_CMS_API, I’m sure something could be arranged 😝

Nudge Nudge 😉 to the EE developers who already have enough on their plate!