Windows Live Writer and Dotnetnuke
Jan23Written by:
2009/01/23 10:36 PM 
Window live writer is an awesome program and tool to have in your arsenal. IT allows you to compile, edit, write blog posts for multiple blogs of line. But it unfortunately does not work with all blogs
Window live writer is an awesome program and tool to have in your arsenal. IT allows you to compile, edit, write blog posts for multiple blogs of line.
But it unfortunately does not work with all blogs. Primarily because of the blog itself and not WLW. DNN is no exception. For a while now, people have asked for a way to edit your blog off line. Well that time is now. Well is has been for a while, but I have only figured it out now. You can now set up WLW with your DNN blog, and edit it offline, then post when you connect or feel you're ready.
You will need to have WLW, which you can download from Microsoft, and the latest verion of DNN blog module, which is 3.5.1. Then all you need to do is set it up. Here is a blog where you can find more information about this. But I have also listed the procedures found on that blog, here.
If you haven't yet set up your WLW to post to your blog, it's really easy. Here's the steps:
1) Start WLW, and progress through the first couple of steps, indicating you already have a blog, and that it's with 'Another Blog Service'.
2) Enter your blog Url and DNN username and password that you blog under
3) Select 'MetaWeblog API' as the type of weblog
4) Enter your Blog Posting Url : this is pretty easy to get. Its http://www.yourdomain.com/DesktopModules/Blog/blogpost.ashx?tabid=nn where nn = the tabId your blog lives on. You can get this from the 'Blog Settings' option of the Blog module if you don't know your tabid.
Once you've done all that, there's one more step you need to do if you've got Url Master installed:
5) Go to the 'Friendly Url Settings' screen, and scroll down to the 'Advanced Regex Settings' section. Expand this, and in the 'doNotRedirectRegex' field, add this to the end:
|/DesktopModules/
If you don't already have anything in this field, you don't need the leading '|' character, you'd just enter /DesktopModules/.
This will prevent the blogpost.ashx handler from getting a 301 redirect - this happens because the Url contains the 'tabId' key, so the Url Master code believes it to be of the 'old' unfriendly Url format, and tries to come up with a friendlier version.
The same instructions will apply to those using the iFinity Friendly Url Provider : just put the aforementioned value into the 'doNotRedirectRegex' attribute in your web.config file.
After doing this, you should be good to blog!
Happy blogging Dotnetnuke bloggers.
blog comments powered by