Those of you who know me will know that I am no developer, so it was with a certain sense of achievement that I created my first ‘hello world’ piece in Visual C# yesterday*. That said, it was more functional than ‘hello world’ and is a very simple plug-in for Windows Live Writer enabling our non-technical staff to embed the Read More link into Joomla! without having to type

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each time. For those that have looked at this blog before you will also know that I have written about Joomla! and Live Writer previously.

The plug-in can be downloaded from live.com and should be copied into C:Program FilesWindows LiveWriterPlugins (or wherever Writer is installed) and is accessed from the Insert menu (see screenshot).

 

The plug-in has been tested to work with the metaWeblog XML-RPC API but does not work properly with others. I will set out why I think this is the case in the technical notes section…

* created with help. Many thanks to Scøtt Lovegrove for providing a great tutorial on how to go about this.

Background

The school where I work uses Joomla! for the school website, and we have been looking for a solution to enable our non-specialist staff members to update the site without getting overly burdened by the more technical aspects of what sits behind the page. As in many workplaces, Word is the default text processor but the Joomla editor doesn’t cope particularly well with stripping the Word code out of documents, whereas Live Writer does a good job of this. Live Writer also enables much easier placing of images and also the automation of their resizing – again important if the full range of image manipulation tools are not available. We have therefore decided to start using Live Writer as the Joomla! editor, coupled with the metaWeblog API from Justo Gonzalez de Rivera, thereby giving the users a reasonably consistent feel when compared with the software they are already used to.

The plug-in I developed yesterday fills a missing piece in terms of what can be done online vs. offline.

Technical notes

What I hadn’t fully appreciated until I began looking into this, is that Joomla! doesn’t actually store the

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code in the database. Instead it is there to tell the online editor to split the article between two different fields contained within the record in the jos_content table; with introtext storing everything above the readmore, fulltext for everything below.

The metaWeblog plug-in handles this correctly, but unfortunately the MovableType plugin doesn’t interpret it properly and therefore the whole article gets saved in introtext. The only remedy for this is to open, and resave, the article using the Joomla backend.