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logoI’ve been using Drupal for 9 years 1 month for this blog and it has served me really well, except working with Windows Live Writer. Every time I reinstalled Windows I had to go through the stupid jumps to get it working again, but thankfully people had documented the process so it was never an issue.

With the introduction of Open Live Writer it changed AGAIN, so this is a guide for you (& me for my next reinstall) on how to configure it.

Drupal

On the Drupal side you need to install the BlogAPI module: https://www.drupal.org/project/blogapi 

This provides a bunch of additional features that are needed for it to work.

Make sure the BlogAPI is configured to use the MetaWeblog mode.

Open Live Writer

This is a lot simplier once Drupal is setup

  1. When adding a blog, select "Other services"
  2. Set your web address to be similar to this:
    http://EXAMPLE.COM/blog/1
    < The important part here is /blog/1. Blog should refer to the content type name & 1 should refer to the blog ID.
  3. OLW won't auto detect Drupal, so you need to choose select Movable Type API from the list of options.
  4. Next, set the remote posting URL to:
    http://EXAMPLE.COM/blogapi/xmlrpc
  5. And move on to finishing the process. A word of note here, it might work getting the theme for the blog yet, this largely depends on your Drupal config & other modules.

Fix the theme loading

I have Taxonomy setup on my blog and it is a required field. The test post that was done to detect the theme would post with a category ‘Uncategorized’, which I did not have.

The second step was once I had setup the blog in Open Live Writer, I had to make a registry change to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\OpenLiveWriter\Weblogs\<LONG NUMBER>

Inside there is a key called ‘HomepageUrl’ and I had to change that to be where the blog could be found. In my case it pointed to

http://EXAMPLE.COM/users/username
and changed it to just
http://EXAMPLE.COM
.