Using Windows Live Writer with Joomla

Many of you know that I am a fan of Windows Live Writer when using WordPress.  Well, I’ve decided to see if I could use it with another great content management system, Joomla. 

Out of the box, Joomla is not compatible with Live Writer, however I did find a few tools to get it to work.  Although it is not flawless it does do the trick.  The biggest issue is that you can’t select categories from within Live Writer. 

You have to set up a new weblog account for each category on your Joomla site.  So essentially, posting to a specific category requires posting to a different weblog.

So to get things moving you need to first

1. grab the Movable Type XML-RPC plugin.  This provides the API for Live Writer to post to Joomla. Be forewarned…the plugin site is not very easy to follow.  In fact I was downloading and installing the wrong plugin and couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working 🙂 duh!  The actual download link is this.

   The file archive contains two items:

• Movabletype mambot (zipped)
• XMLRPC connector (zipped)

  You don’t have to unzip the Mambot, but you do have to unzip the XMLRPC file, which will give you a directory called xmlrpc.

2. The next thing you do is move that xmlrpc directory to the root of your joomla website.

3. Install the Mambot by going to your Joomla admin page, select the Installation/Mambots menu item.  Browse and select the Movabletype Mambot.  Click Upload File & Install

4. Startup Windows Live Writer and from the Weblog menu, select Add Weblog Account.

5. Select the Another weblog service option > Next > Enter the URL and admin user information for your Joomla site.

Next, select the weblog type as Movable Type API. 

Enter the URL of your XMLRPC directory (which should resemble something like this: http://www.yourjoomlasite.com/xmlrpc/index.php)

Now you are ready to start posting.  One more thing, you may want to pick up the Frontpage Auto Update component.  Otherwise, when you post a new item, it will not automatically be set to display on the homepage.