Using Windows Live Writer in PhpWebsite

Anyone using Windows Live Writer (WLW) in PhpWebsite (PWS)? I searched the web but got no relevant result. I asked the question in phpwsforums, and am still waiting for replies.  So I tried it myself.

PWS has a third party module called article manager, which has an XML-RPC capability. This should enable PWS users to post entries to a PWS-based website with the article manager module installed using offline blogging tools such as WLW. But I wonder why nobody has tried doing this yet. So using a local test installation of PWS, I configured my WLW to connect to the article manager’s XML-RPC server. This can be done by simply pointing WLW to http://localhost/index.php?module=article&xmlrcp=1 (NOTE: replace "localhost" with the actual domain name of your PWS installation.) First, I used the metaweblog API.

The results? During the configuration, I already encountered a couple of problems. First, WLW was not able to download the website’s style template. But this is minor. This will only disable WLW’s web preview feature. You will not be able to see how your entry will look like when it is published in your site. Second, WLW was unable to delete the temporary entry it posted in the site during the configuration. WLW usually does this to know the template used in the target website. Third, WLW also failed to retrieve the set of categories.

Posting a new entry resulted in an invalid server response. The following is the error message "The response to the metaWeblog.newPost method received from the weblog server was invalid: Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server." However, the entry did get posted. The entire entry went to the summary of the article, and the body was empty. Re-publishing the same entry gave the same invalid server response error. But this time, instead of replacing the previously posted entry, a new one was created.

Next, I tried a different configuration. This time, I used the Movable Type API. WLW was still unable to download the website template and still unable to delete the temporary entry posted during the configuration. But it did retrieve the list of categories from the website. Hmm, some progress!

With MT, the excerpt section and the split post feature were enabled. But posting a new entry still gave the same error described above. The entry still got published with the excerpt part stored in the summary and the entire content in the body of the article. Reposting an edited entry, however, generated a new article instead of overwriting the original one. Basically, I obtained the same behavior as when using the metaweblog API. 

Well, I guess XML-RPC is still not for phpWebsite.