Since version 3 of umbraco, umbraco supports windows live writer. For those who don’t know how to set things up, here is a short howto based on my experience.

Go to the users section in umbraco

Select for which user you want to enable this ( or create a new one) , so just select your user from the tree.

As you will see since v3 there are now 2 tab pages. One has the name of your user and the other is named content channel.

The content channel tab is the place where you need to do the configuration.

• Name: this will be the name of the content channel
• Start Node in Content : Here you need to select the parent node, the documents will be published under this node
• Search all children : this is a checkbox, check this if you want to search the entire structure and not just the first level children
• Star Node in Media Library: haven’t tested this but i think this will be the node where the media from your posts will be saved, this isn’t a mandatory item , so just leaving it without choosing an item will work
• Document Type: Here you need to select what the document type of the post you are going to make is. So  if you have a document type ‘blog post’ and you want to be making blog post documents from inside live writer you will need to select ‘blog post’
• Description Field: This is the property of the document type where you want to store the content
• Category Field: This is the property of the document type where you want to store the categories
• Excerpt Field: Haven’t tested this ( not mandatory ) but I think this will fill up the property with a small excerpt of your content

So this takes care of the umbraco side of things, now how to set up live writer.

So start live writer and choose weblog/ add weblog account.

This will start the add weblog wizard, the first form you will see is this:

Here you need to select Another weblog service. Next step is to setup the credentials

Weblog homepage url: this is just the url of your website ( like http://www.examplesite.com )

Username: this needs to be the login of the umbraco user where you set up the content channel earlier

Password: the password of the user

On to the next step.

The provider umbraco uses is the Metaweblog API

The remote posting Url needs to be like this :

http://www.examplesite.com/umbraco/channels.aspx

So the final step is to approve the settings