Review of Zoundry, Microsoft Live Writer and Flock with Textpattern

Over the course of several days, I struggled to use Zoundry, Microsoft Live Writer or Flock to post to my Turtle Interactive blog. None of these desktop blog writing tools for Textpattern really works well with the new XML-RPC plug-in for Textpattern.

I experienced annoying bugs with all of them. In the end, Live Writer was the least buggy and what I’m using to write this entry.

Zoundry

This is the application that seemed to be the most likely to work and frankly is the one which I would like to use. But I continue to get errors that make it impossible to use.

Setup

Set up went pretty well; auto-detect worked. It is the only application to actually support “Textpattern” blogs. However, Zoundry sees each “section” as a separate blog and each section has the same blog entries. This is very confusing.

Writing

Writing entries is pretty straight-forward, but the most glaring problem is that there is no way create any h1, h2, h3 tags using its editor. You can just make stuff bigger or smaller—but not using markup but embedded style tags. Yuck!

Posting

The wizard the steps you through publishing the entry is the most complete; however, it rarely worked for me. I got “Error posting entry” when editing existing some blog entries, but not all. It was very frustrating and I gave up trying to find a pattern. I seemed to have no problems posting new entries.

Microsoft Live Writer

I did not expect to be writing this using a Microsoft product, but it is the least bugy solution. It also has some nice features that were easy to use.

Setup

To my surprise, set up was easy, however, there is no “documentation” for how to use Textpattern with Live Writer. You just need to use the Custom MovableType API. It is pretty smart.

Writing

It has a simple text editor that supports h1, h2, h3 tags. It also has a nice feature where you can write your entry seeing it “live” in your blog. That is a really cool feature. Also I like the nice way that it allowed you to edit and insert images. Worked very nice for me.

Posting

The only bug is that it did not write to the “URL-only title” field in Textpattern. I found that if this field is empty, the entry would appear on the article list, but I would get a 404 error when full page.

If you filled out the Properties > Link field (at the bottom of the screen) and published your entries in draft mode—then it did. This sucks.

For some reason, if ”URL-only title” field was left blank I got 404 errors. This may not be a bug for Live Writer but for Textpattern.

Flock

I was really hoping that Flock was going to be my solution. With it’s built-in support for Flickr and the web snippets—I figured it would be a my blogging utopia. Alas, it falls short.

Setup

Textpattern is not one of the supported blogs, but you use the same Custom Movable Type setup procedure as for Live Writer. It is not bad.

Writing

Like with Zoundry, there is no support for using heading tags (h1, h2, etc.). It also lack any ability to edit blog entries by download them from your blog; it only works from what is locally saved on your hard drive. The drag and drop support for Flickr is pretty cool—but do I really want to upload all my blog images to my Flickr account?

Posting

I will use Flock to post new entries.

Questions

Maybe some folks smarter than me can answer these questions,

• Why does Textpattern documentation say I can leave the “URL-only title” field blank? But I get 404 errors if I do? Is this because of the whole “clean URLs” functionality?
• Should I set my preferences in Textpattern from “Use Textpattern” to “Leave text alone”?

I would love to hear from anyone else attempting to use the XML-RPC plugin for Textpattern.

5 comments | Aug 31, 15:21 | by Tim Bednar cms Textpattern

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