Blog Azeroth

Yes, I use the horrible standard UI (+TinyMCE adv) to write my posts... and edit them. This is giving me a bit of a problem - any time I save a draft or edit a post the formatting changes. It pretty much only changes line breaks - where a full break is shown it's sometimes collapsed into nothing or just a line return and sometimes a single break becomes a full double-line break.

This is irritating me no end as, even when I read things over three million times before posting, I sometimes go back and edit for clarity / mistakes and suchlike and I don't want the formatting to mess up each time. Can anyone tell me if there's just an inherent problem with the system or am I just being a nubcake? (wouldn't be the first time).

I also tried using windows live writer - which was awesome but didn't seem to be able to plug into the wp image uploader which is a very important part of my blogging If anyone could point me in the direction of a way to fix that then I'd be tempted to switch over...

Please forgive any random bad phrasing etc. tonight - drank too much coffee whilst raiding and have a bit of a headache Xx;

Yeah, we go through this every time with Flinthammer Hall. No idea what the heck causes it, or why it hasn't been fixed in a patch.

This might be a bit more cumbersome, but if you have FTP access you can upload your image manually first and then use the same "insert picture" link but click on the second tab (insert picture from web).

Again, more cumbersome, but at least you don't lose out on the format stuff.

So - my other half (a computer programmer) took a more detailed look for me when I complained again and I thought I'd let you know what we came up with eventually - center tags are not supported properly - it treats them as a block level element and thus doesn't wrap them in a paragraph tag but firefox doesn't treat them as a block level element and thus they normally need a paragraph tag.

This was fixed by using
This fixes a secondary problem with the image messing up the (unshown) paragraph tag which immediately follows it (these are unshown in the editor itself, even in the code section hence why it isn't obvious they're breaking).

Obviously this will only fix this problems for nublets like me who use center tags... Really wish it'd support them, though. Not sure if that's the problem over at Flinthammer Hall but I do know you guys are fond of yer images too so here's hoping this helps you!

As for ftp: Yes, I do have access to ftp and would upload/link but the other extra thing I liked about it was that it did auto-thumbnails with links

Hi, I'm one of the developers of Windows Live Writer. WLW should be able to upload images to WordPress--if not, I can help you figure out what the problem is, just e-mail me at joe.cheng *AT* microsoft.com.

Or if you prefer, you can configure WLW to automatically upload images via FTP. Just go to Weblog | Edit Weblog Settings | Images, and click the FTP option.

Are you kidding me? First I get an email from a WP plugins guy with detailed responses to all the problems and issues with that 5 star plugin.

Now we've attracted the interest of a Windows Live Writer Dev?!

What's next? Apple representatives for us mac users when we're frustrated with our machines?

Not that I'm upset or anything. I'm just a little surprised that our little community seems to have an eye on it from developers, heh.

This thread inspired me to go give Windows Live Writer a try. Except for one crash, it worked well. To not hijack the thread Auric, images worked for me.

Here's a min-review from a wordpress point of view for others that might want to try it:

• It is quick and looks good.
• Works out of the box, almost no configuration.
• It has it's own plugins which are interesting though currently limited.
• It doesn't integrate with wordpress posting plugins. For example, if you have sticky posts, cforms, or some other posting plugin you won't get the options when you post. They still work, you just have to do it manually.
• Advanced tag support is limited. For example, if you want to manage styles via classes, headings and captions on tables, ids, or others that tinymce+adv does you'll have to resort to source editing.
• It was well behaved at not clobbering the few source changes I made.
• It adds extra formatting attributes which override your style sheet and cruft up the xhtml. This is good if you don't write you own stylesheets, and a pain for those of who do. An option to turn off this behavior would be good.

Overall, this is a nice piece of software for most people. If you blog to a hosted account like at blogger or wordpress, it does what you need well. If you are self hosting, taking advantage of certain plugins, or you make wide use of stylesheets for formatting it is probably not for you.

Thanks for the feedback, Aos!



This is true in general. You may find my plugin helpful if you have a lot of these: http://www.joecheng.com/code/DynamicTemplate/



Are you talking specifically about images and border styles? If so, you can get rid of those by clicking the image and on the right, selecting "Inherit from weblog" for the border style. You can save this as the default by clicking the "Save as default" button at the bottom. Otherwise, let me know what kind of extra formatting attributes you're referring to. Thanks!

Nice plugin. It looks powerful but perhaps too complicated for most unless you are a poweruser. I see what you are trying to do with variables, substitution, or maybe a general framework. The .swf examples are great btw.



In the very brief and unfair time I looked at it, the extra cruft was with width, height, and align on table elements and some attributes in lists I don't remember.