Student Life Selects WordPress MU

Sam Guzik over on CoPress.org details the successful relaunch of Student Life, the “independent newspaper of Washington University in St. Louis”, on the WordPress MU platform:

In their evaluation of various platform choices they concluded:
“Although Drupal is also extremely powerful, we found that WordPress’s interface was better suited to a workflow that would begin to allow [...]

Fifty Sites. Ten Months. One CMS.

I’ve been chatting with the folks at Tierra Innovation and WNET.ORG (Channel Thirteen in New York) on their impressive collaboration utilizing WordPress MU as a CMS for WNET.ORG’s network of high-traffic websites:

Using WordPress MU’s built-in features along with custom themes and plugins such as WPDB Profiling, they made it easier and much cheaper for WNET.ORG [...]

The Ford Story Chooses WordPress

The Ford Story is a recently launched site committed to making Ford’s progress towards getting new high-quality, fuel-efficient cars, and trucks on the road today transparent and open. The site is completely powered by WordPress and uses WordPress as a CMS to deliver a wide variety of static content, videos, photos, and dynamic updates.

We talked [...]

Desktop Blogging Clients

22 Jan 08
Raanan Bar-Cohen

We’ve received a few inquiries lately asking if a blogging tool exists that a) lives as as an application on your desktop and b) supports creating content and editing while you are offline.

The answer is yes, and Microsoft Live Writer (free to download) is one such tool. It supports blogs hosted on WordPress.com as well as self-hosted WordPress.org blogs. Lots more info here, and you can download it here.

On the Mac OS X platform, Marsedit ($29.95 with a free 30 day trial ) is another great option with lots of capabilities.

So how do these tools communicate with WordPress? They use XML-RPC, a cool technology that allows things that aren’t WordPress to talk to your blog. When Flickr or Youtube posts to your blog, or you use a desktop blogging client they use XML-RPC.

Developers looking to learn more about XML-RPC can read about it on the WordPress.org Codex site and by joining the mailing list.

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9 Responses to “Desktop Blogging Clients”

Comments are closed.

  1. hombrelobo January 23rd, 2008 at 2:28 am

    My favorite for windows by far is Blogdesk: http://www.blogdesk.org/en/index.htm

    And I haven’t found any good one for ubuntu ….

  2. Miriam January 23rd, 2008 at 3:32 am

    I love Windows Live Writer. Aside from using it for creating blog posts, I use it to manage drafts and ideas for posts I would like to get around to writing. Its simple interface and feature set also makes it great for writing and saving simple documents that don’t need all the extra stuff that Word has.

  3. Chris Thomson January 23rd, 2008 at 9:10 am

    Their is also ecto ( http://infinite-sushi.com/software/ecto/ ) for Mac and Windows, but I still prefer MarsEdit.

  4. Joseph Scott January 23rd, 2008 at 2:58 pm

    Windows Live Writer has implemented most of the new XML-RPC features that we’ve been adding to WordPress. Unfortunately it only works on Windows. For Mac OS X MarsEdit it probably the best client out there (free or not).

    We’d be thrilled to work with other XML-RPC clients to improve their support for WordPress. I’d be happy to answer questions about the new features we’ve been adding, developers are welcome to contact me directly or on the wp-xmlrpc email list that Raanan mentioned.

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  6. Karen Jackie January 24th, 2008 at 10:00 am

    We often recommend Adobe Contribute ( http://www.adobe.com/products/contribute/ ) for those who are willing to pay a few bucks or ScribeFire, a FireFox add-on, ( http://www.scribefire.com/ ) for those looking for free tools.

  7. todmaffin January 28th, 2008 at 10:45 am

    MarsEdit is crap. I really don’t understand why people like it. It makes malformed URLs, drag-and-drop (photos) doesn’t exist, its multiple-window interface is archaic, and there’s no WYSIWYG.

    Come on, even FrontPage (PC) had WYSIWYG nearly a decade ago.

  8. Daniel Jalkut January 29th, 2008 at 9:34 pm

    Tod: I’ve prioritized different features in MarsEdit than WYSIWYG. I agree it will be an awesome feature and very important to a certain category of user, once I get the time to do it right.

    I’m curious what you’re alluding to when you describe malformed URLs. I would consider this a bug, and if you get a chance to let me know what it is, exactly, I will be sure to put it on my fix list.

    Perhaps the reason you can’t understand why so many other people like it is because other people have different priorities than you do. I certainly don’t aspire to be a modern FrontPage, if that’s the standard of success :)

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