Can I use a 3rd party blog writer (Windows Live Writer) to submit blog entries?

[eddy jones]

I would like to use Windows Live Writer to write to my blog in Confluence.  I have a choice of several different protocols, will any of them work?

WordPress
Blogger
Atom Publishing Protocol
LiveJournal
Community Server
dasBlog
MetaWeblog API
 

Any of these usable protocols to connect to the Confluence blog?

Eddy Jones

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Confluence blogs are pages that are published, searched and rendered slightly differently to other Confluence pages.  There's no real support for blog protocols because Confluence is designed as a wiki over a blogging portal.  It's got a SOAP and REST interface which you could use to poke blogs in if you wanted to, but that's about it.

So, without that, the question really becomes "does Windows Live Writer produce output that Confluence can understand?".

[bc3tech]

Since WLW produces HTML I should hope the answer to that is "yes".

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It can read *standard* HTML from files on the disk - see https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Importing+Pages+from+Disk (I say "standard" because my experience with WLW is that it does some really terrible html sometimes, because it has to botch it to "work" with bad browsers like IE)

[bc3tech]

but... WLW doesn't publish to disk. If Confluence can read pages from disk, then why can't the same endpoint be standardized to accept the HTML coming across from WLW?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Why bother? There's a perfectly good editor built into Confluence. Why use another tool (that could generate rubbish which you'd then have to try and handle) when you can do it in the application directly? The imports are there to help you move from an old redundant tool to Confluence, which implies importing a saved static site, not use a different editor. Let me ask you the same in reverse - does WLW allow you to accept Confluence's dynamic xhtml?

[eddy jones]

Offline editing/creating, for one. In terms of simply generating text with some basic formatting, you are right: Confluence is a perfectly good editor. However, WLW allows you to generate much better layouts, handles images and inserts much better. And simply, I prefer to use it for writing my blog entries. My WordPress blog has a perfectly good editor as well, but I still prefer to use WLW for creating my entries.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's about the only use I could think of too. I save the stuff I'm writing and upload it later, but that works well for me because I always write (text) first and worry about formatting later. So plain text is fine for me, and I don't have to think about all the terrors of translating "clever" html into another format.