Configuring Open Live Writer with Drupal 7

Published on 01 March 2016 Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

I’ve been using Drupal for 9 years and 1 month for this blog, and it has served me well—except when 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, everything changed again. So this is a guide for you (and me for my next reinstall) on how to configure it.

Drupal

On the Drupal side, you need to install the BlogAPI module.

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

Make sure the BlogAPI is configured to use MetaWeblog mode.

Open Live Writer

Once Drupal is set up, this becomes much simpler:

When adding a blog, select "Other services."
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, and 1 should refer to the blog ID.
Open Live Writer (OLW) won’t auto-detect Drupal, so you need to select Movable Type API from the list of options.
Next, set the remote posting URL to:
```
http://EXAMPLE.COM/blogapi/xmlrpc
```
Finish the process. A word of note: it might work to fetch the theme for the blog at this stage, though this largely depends on your Drupal configuration and other modules.

Fix the theme loading

I have Taxonomy set up on my blog, and it’s a required field. The test post done to detect the theme would post with a category ‘Uncategorized’—which I don’t have.

The second step was once I had set up 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 it to where the blog could be found. In my case, it was pointing to:

http://EXAMPLE.COM/users/username

and I changed it to:

http://EXAMPLE.COM