One of my few complaints about WordPress as a blog publishing platform is that the “visual rich editor” isn’t very powerful for formatting and manipulating text and/or HTML. While you can turn off this visual editor, I recently read a WordPress book where w.bloggar was recommended as a (free) option. w.bloggar 4.0, a desktop application used to edit blogs powered by WordPress, Blogger, MovableType and more than 10 other publishing platforms, offers a GUI environment for creating and editing blog posts. Free being one of my favorite things, I decided to give it a try. Matter of fact, this post is my first using that system!
w.bloggar Review
The current install version is 4.0. Setup is very straight forward. Just download the zip or exe, run the installer and start the program. It will prompt you for whether you want a new or have an existing blog, guide you through finding the xmlrpc.php file. (This is kind of “universal translator” code interface the default WordPress install puts in your root blog folder, allowing any program to be designed to pass information to and from a blog that’s live and online.) Enter your username and password and you’re in!
FORMATTING OPTIONS - Upon initial setup, you’re presented with a basic editor interface. There are clearly-marked places to enter your post’s Title and body copy. Of course, w.bloggar provides buttons to apply boldface, italicized, strikethrough and underlined text formatting to your text, as well as buttons for bulleting, linking and aligning. Except for the underline option, this is pretty well the same as WordPress. At first glance, I’m not really impressed. I do like that the program says it will output XHTML compliant code, but using traditional HTML attributes like targets, I’m not sure it’s truly 100% compliant. I also do like that nearly every option is tied to a keyboard shortcut (macro). For example, to underline text, you just press [CTRL]+U. These shortcuts are limited within WordPress.
It does appear there are more font face and size options readily available but (honestly) CSS should be used to set most of these things. On second thought, and CSS-purism aside, this is likely to be a very powerful feature for most users considering most non-technical users wouldn’t be the ones editing the CSS themselves.
So w.bloggar formatting? Eh, it’s ok. I have a feeling a quick search of WordPress plugins would turn up something with similar capabilities, though. Continuing the exploration…
HTML OPTIONS - Now we’re talking. Non breaking spaces, H1, H2, H3, hex colors, comments and more are readily available. Moreover, there’s a table button. Since
i) I, personally, am looking into changing the way I code tables from straight HTML to CSS; and ii) the native WordPress interface doesn’t have much to offer in the way of insertion/creation of tables, I’m interested to see how this feature works out.
TOOLS - This is where a few more features are offered, both basic and advanced. Options to publish to multiple blogs, adjust templates and upload files are placed along side of simple functions like blog properties and spell check. Good features, but I’m interested to see how subsequent versions of w.bloggar will expand the more “advanced” options.
In conclusion, I’m still 50/50 on the product. If I find a few plugins that emulate w.bloggar’s “unique” properties (like tables), it may make the program less useful. Time will tell.
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