openlivewriter / openlivewriter

An open source fork of Windows Live Writer

Open Live Writer

Open Live Writer makes it easy to write, preview, and post to your blog. For more information see http://www.OpenLiveWriter.com/.

Installation

You can install the latest version of Open Live Writer alongside an older version of Windows Live Writer. Visit http://www.OpenLiveWriter.com to download and install the latest release.

Latest News

The current version of Open Live Writer is our first open source version. For a list of known issues see GitHub or take a look at the roadmap to see what the current plans are.

For the latest news and updates about Open Live Writer, you can follow us on Twitter (@OpenLiveWriter), by keeping an eye on the website http://www.OpenLiveWriter.com or by watching this repo and subscribing to notifications.

Contributing

Open Live Writer is an open source project and wouldn't exist without the passionate community of volunteer contributors. If you would like to help out then please see the Contributing guide.

This project has adopted the code of conduct defined by the Contributor Covenant to clarify expected behavior in our community. For more information see the .NET Foundation Code of Conduct.

License

Open Live Writer proudly uses the MIT License.

History

The product that became Live Writer was originally created by a small, super-talented team of engineers including JJ Allaire, Joe Cheng, Charles Teague, and Spike Washburn. The team was acquired by Microsoft in 2006 and organized with the Spaces team. Becky Pezely joined the team and over time, the team grew and shipped many popular releases of Windows Live Writer.

As Microsoft was planning for the version of Windows Live that would coincide with Windows 8 operating system release, the teams that built the Windows Live client apps for Windows were encouraged to focus on building a smaller set of Windows 8 apps designed to work well with both traditional PC input mechanisms and touch. With the rise of micro-blogging platforms and other forms of sharing, eventually this team decided to conclude their work on Windows Live Writer with Windows Live Writer 2012.

Even though there was no active development, Windows Live Writer continued to be a favorite tool of a passionate community of Windows PC users for authoring, editing, and publishing blog posts. Data from WordPress.com at the time suggested that Windows Live Writer (even two years after active development ended) was the #1 app for authoring a blog post to WordPress.com from a Windows PC.

A few employees at Microsoft took an interest in reviving Live Writer as an open source project in their spare time. By January 2015, a group of about a half-dozen engineers interested in spending some of their volunteer time to help release an updated version of Live Writer had found each other and began work on getting this open source fork of Live Writer formed and ready to ship. In December 2015 Microsoft donated the code to the .NET Foundation and this passionate group of volunteer engineers rapidly assembled the first open source version.

Building

Open Live Writer can be built by running build.cmd found in this directory.
It can be opened in Visual Studio. The solution is in src/managed/writer.sln -- if you see errors in Visual Studio run build.cmd from the command prompt and it should be resolved. The main program is src/managed/OpenLiveWriter/ApplicationMain.cs . To run from Visual Studio, set the startup project to OpenLiveWriter.

.NET Foundation

The Open Live Writer project is supported by the .NET Foundation.

openlivewriter's Issues

Rationalize localization strings

There are 4 different files that seem to contain the definition of a single resource string (StringId.cs, String.csv, Strings.resx, etc) -- it is unclear this factoring is really necessary and causes a change to a string to be duplicated in multiple places.

This should be rationalized to be more central and understandable to the community.

When I was a developer on Writer, we used \src\managed\OpenLiveWriter.Localization\compile.bat and only made changes to DisplayMessages.xml, Strings.csv, Commands.xml and Ribbon.xml. compile.bat would then generate: CommandId.cs, MessageId.cs, StringId.cs, Properties.resx, PropertiesNonLoc.resx, and Strings.resx. In reality, compile.bat is really just a thin wrapper around locutil.exe, whose source code is at \src\managed\LocUtil\

There was also a separate, custom tool that ran on the Ribbon.xml that I wasn't able to open source, so if we want to bring back Ribbon.xml into this auto-generation, we'll need to re-write the support for it. Right now, Ribbon.xml moved over to \src\unmanaged\OpenLiveWriter.Ribbon\Ribbon.xml .

@kamransaeed is looking into this

@willduff, @timheuer

NullReferenceException while trying to set up an AtomPub provider

Getting this for this blog which has AtomPub integration works fine with WLW:

Old branding/BlogThis in resources

see: https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter/blob/master/src/unmanaged/OpenLiveWriter.Shortcuts/OpenLiveWriterShortcuts.rc#L16
Remove:

• Windows Live
• 2 Blog This entries

Move to newer Maps control

Map experience on Win10 isn't great. Looks like old map controls still in use and should move to newest Map SDK and/or move to OpenStreetMaps.

Initially you get:

and then after 'allowing blocked content'

Making it effectively useless as-is.

@timheuer

unable to login in with blogger

Trying to access my site during setup / launch it is asking for a url, username, and password. I'm using my gmail account and password for my blogger account I'm not sure if this is the broken oauth support. Its unclear how to login (the error messages is invalid username and password but i was able to use these credentials to login in to the blogger web portal) or even launch the program without providing the blog connection information perhaps this shouldn't be required.

Enhancement: Buttons on the Ribbon remembering the last choice

One of the nice things would be for the buttons, like the Pictures button, to remember the last choice. For example, if I last uploaded pictures from my computer, let a click on the button just start this process. If I last added links from the web, let this be the choice, without requiring the drop down to open and another selection/click.

Move build tools and utilities into separate repo and publish them as NuGet packages

Per @Eilon 's comment

The way we solve that in ASP.NET is by splitting build tools into a separate process:

1. The source code for build tools are typically in a separate repo that is built only when their source code changes.
2. When their source code changes, they are compiled and the build outputs are packaged as NuGet packages and uploaded to a feed on MyGet that has all the build tools.
3. The main repo (i.e. this repo) uses the NuGet packages to restore the build tools and then run them.

This avoids the nastiness of checking binaries into a Git repo, and also avoids the hassle/slowness of recompiling the tools on every build.

@willduff

Remove YouTube service until OAuth works

FWIW auth/login doesn't even work on the current Windows Essentials version for me. With YouTube moving to the Google auth model, this feels like it needs to be re-worked significantly

@timheuer, @willduff, @writeline

AtomPub is not on the list of blog providers

I am not sure if this is really a valid issue but it feels like AtomPub should be inside the blog providers list below:

CI badge is private

https://ci.appveyor.com/project/ScottHanselman/openlivewriter

Live Writer 2012 and Open Live Writer Side-by-Side?

Could I run into any issues if I install Open Live Writer on my machine while I still have Live Writer 2012 installed?

Live Writer do not show editing theme when cuts are enabled

I'm using a custom weblog engine that implements Metaweblog API. Main blog post view uses cuts and shows only excerpts in the paged view. Live Writer (Windows and Open) download and do NOT show downloaded theme. When I disable cuts (and main blog feed shows full posts), Live Writer shows editing theme.

I can build and deploy Writer in multiple languages

We inherited a proprietary localization format from Windows Live Writer that included use of 3rd party software that we no longer have access to. All of the old translations are stored under the intl\lba folder, but there is not current way to build them into the required WindowsLive.Writer.Localization.resources.dll and WindowsLiveWriterShortcuts.dll.mui. Each language has it's own set of two DLLs.

We need to make sure we can build Open Live Writer in all of the supported languages and we need to either ship with all languages or provide an option to download and install localizations separately. We also need to update the localizations as there have been many changes to strings in the switch from Windows Live Writer to Open Live Writer

Involved: @willduff, @baragano

Can't install - IT policies may be restricting access to this folder.

Installation has failed.

Unable to write to C:/ProgramData/xxx - IT policies may be restricting access to this folder.

Windows 10 TH2 latest update.

Linux version

Will you offer linux binaries soon?

Release Open Live Writer on GitHub

Capturing the things we want to do as part of the release. Feel free to edit as necessary

• Make this repo public
• Rename testpage2.html to index.html
• @shanselman publish blog post
• @martinwoodward public the .NET Foundation guest post from @RobDolin
• Post to the twitterverse
• Send a PR to https://github.com/dotnet/home adding Open Live Writer

CI

Should we set up a CI server for this project? something like Appveyor seems ideal. I'm happy to take suggestions and investigate options that people would like to explore

Set up .NET Foundation CLA automation bot

It's used throughout many projects and would be great to have here.

@martinwoodward do you know who to contact to set that up? (For projects internal to MSFT we have a tool to set it up; I don't know how it works for these.)

Errors building with VS2013 / Dev12 tools - requires .NET 4.5.2 targeting pack installed.

Posting this here mostly for info because it might be useful as FAQ answer for some people.

If you don't have VS2015 (dev14) installed on your Win7 machine, then build.cmd will conveniently fall back to using VS2013 (dev12) build tools, but you will still get build errors if .NET 4.5.2 Targeting Pack is not installed.
For example:

warning MSB3644: The reference assemblies for framework ".NETFramework,Version=v4.5.2" were not found. To resolve this, install the SDK or Targeting Pack for this framework version or retarget your application to a version of the framework for which you have the SDK or Targeting Pack installed. Note that assemblies will be resolved from the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and will be used in place of reference assemblies. Therefore your assembly may not be correctly targeted for the framework you intend.

The managed components in OLW are targeting .NET 4.5.2, so you also need the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.2 Developer Pack installed too even if you have .NET 4.5.2 Runtime bits installed on your machine.
Download is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42637

See build log output on Win7 machine before and after installing 4.5.2 Targeting Pack for more details: https://gist.github.com/jthelin/435213878c0b8c1b9451

Add Test Suite

A test suite for devs to run unit tests against code changes would be helpful for release. Opinions?

Yes definitely. Writer has essentially 0 unit tests currently.

My recommendations are:

• Add unit tests for non-UI classes and modules (e.g. most things in OpenLiveWriter.CoreServices should have a unit test).
• Use the existing UI automation to test the UI (Windows Forms, the Ribbon and the MSHTML editor are all complex and large enough that mocking them out would be an exercise in futility)

@writeline, @willduff

Picture won't post to LiveJournal

I tried to post to my LiveJournal using OLW, and although the blog capabilities look identical in WLW and OLW, OLW failed to post a simple entry containing a picture, with the attached dialog box:

This functionality did/does work perfectly with LiveJournal in Windows Live Writer.

Support publish content ( with markdown ) to GitHub

For now there are about 1 million websites hosted in GitHub using Jekyll and markdown. So can GitHub be one of the blog providers ? Allow users to publish markdown to GitHub seems natural these days.

MacOS support

Adding this to the backlog of items that I would want to work on. Comment here if you are interested to be a part of a Mac port for this project.

Support for Markdown editing and previews

OLW needs support for Markdown editing and preview. Will start looking at implementing it based on Marked (something that VSCode is using).

@dend

Typographical error in FAQs

See https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter/wiki/Frequently-Asked-Questions-(FAQ)

In:

Q: How can I support this effort?

A: Here are a few ways you can support the Open Live Writer effort:
•Use the product
•If you like it, tell your friends
•If you have suggestions, tell the volunteer team
•Raise and issue or contribute code at GitHub

Last bullet point should be "Raise an issue"

Including building the SDK nuget package as part of the build process

At the moment it's a manual job to run BuildNuget.cmd, this should probably be included in the build process at the same time as it's building the installer package.

Support an Open Live Writer Uri Scheme

This would be for launching Live Writer from other apps.
Proposed scheme:

openlivewriter://?title={title}&content={content}

When launched via this method, if the title and content values are provided, those should be pre-populated.

We may also want to look at the QueryString parameters and consider supporting various options from RSS 2.0 (ex: title, description) and Atom 1.0 (title, summary? or content?, etc.)

@ScottIsAFool, @shanselman, @RobDolin

Fix link to license in NUSPEC files

Guys, sorry, don't have tools on this machine to change this, but we need to update link to license in both NUSPEC files.

Right now it points to a
https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter/blob/bringup/license.txt?raw=true

We should also consider using the same approach to passing version to SDK NuGet as we do for a setup package.

Allow to install without configuring blog accounts

I use Writer without any configured account.

It's a pain to have to configure an account just to be able to install Writer.

Add Find and Replace Functionality

In any text editor, whether for blogs or otherwise, being able to find and replace text within that text is now almost seen as a no-brainer feature. There were plugins that tried to fill the void on this, but would be good if it was supported properly by Writer itself.

It would be ideal to target this for v1.0. Reason being most of the plugins that filled this gap, the authors no longer have the source code (I've been asking around) and so they won't work when OLW goes live. So this functionality would get lost.

@ScottIsAFool, @RobDolin

Login not working for blogger account

Tried login to OLW with blogger credential with an active blog account on Google blogger, but was not able to do so. It always says "Invalid username or password". Not facing this issue on WLW. Please check login system on OLW for blogger.

CoreCLR/Cross platform support

This would be a great project to represent cross platform support! You could upgrade to the CoreCLR and use a project like https://github.com/Perspex/Perspex for the UI!

Pull down NuGet.exe as part of pre-build

Per @borrillis in pull request #41:

There needs to be a 'prebuild' step that ensures the nuget executable has been downloaded. Currently this is done in the build.cmd batch file. We need to move this into an MSBuild project and set it as a dependency for all the other projects.

Remove Ping servers/trackbacks

As a blogger, I'm not really sure these are 'things' anymore versus better content management. This feels like a candidate for removal that someone could augment with a plugin if they wanted.

@timheuer

Convert Google Blogger ClientLogin to OAuth 2.0

Google Blogger deprecated ClientLogin in 2012 but Open Live Writer is still using it. We should update to OAuth 2.0. Google provides a .NET library for OAuth 2.0 at https://github.com/google/google-api-dotnet-client.

Following is a brief history of the current work on this issue.

We identified the code where the login process and the BloggerAtomClient, but for doing this we need to modify the UI of the wizard and create a new step where we prompt the user to click on authorization process and then get the OAuth token from Google Server.

There are some open questions:

• Where do we store the token, as the password of the user on the CredentialStorage?
• When and how to handle OAuth invalidations, for example when the user is going to publish but he handle is invalid, ect.
• We need to create a Application inside Google Developer Console, I can create now using my personal google account but, of couse, in the future we need to use Microsoft´s account for creating this app.

Work has been done by @guerrerotook and @asishv

So the remaining items are

• Uploading youtube videos
• Obtaining categories [@guerrerotook mentioned that this is working but I was not able to use it]
• Adding new categories to a post
• Testing edge cases in general
• Code cleanup [I believe the wizard strings are hardcoded in the code not in strings.resx file]

@willduff, @wasker, @RobDolin, @sitox, @Eilon

Save dialog prompt pops up even if nothing was changed

Open OLW, then close it immediately, without changing anything. You'll get the "unsaved changes" dialog. It shouldn't appear until the title or the content was changed.

Install: Add OLW package to Chocolatey

Adding Open Live Writer to Chocolatey opens up installation scenarios https://Chocolatey.org/

My assumption is that we would just initially install via the Setup.exe. And from there the Squirrel auto updater keeps the version up to date. There shouldn't be any reason to increase the chocolatey package version to manually upgrade.

Configure FxCop

Add FxCop into the build and configure it appropriately.

@willduff

DPI scaling issues

The HTML Style picker has issues with scaling on high-dpi screens.

To repro: Run on a high-dpi device (in this case Surface Pro 3 - Windows 10.10586)

Configure Drafts and Posts folder

The existing version (and previous ones) had a path stored in the registry for keeping the drafts and posted items. Can we move this to an options setting to make it easy to reconfigure Open Live Writer?

Support for Tumblr?

I looked at the closed issue about WLW feature parity, and saw in the OLW "roadmap", that under v1.0 the "Key Use Case(s)" it lists "Blog host platforms: v0.5 plus TypePad, LiveJournal, and other popular blogging platforms."

Does "other popular blogging platforms" include support for Tumblr, even though it isn't explicitly stated?

Rename Setup.exe

Please change the setup.exe fle on the http://openlivewriter.org/ website to something more unique please.

Not sure if this is something which should be fixed within this repo though...

Feature Parity with WLW 2012?

Does this version of Live Writer have the same features as the 2012 version I have installed currently?

Horrible Undo bug plaguing WLW and now OLW

I'm beyond ecstatic that WLW lives on as OLW, now there's hope that the bugs accumulated in the last years will be fixed.

This is the biggest bug by far for editors, and I see it's still present.

Basically, undo ignores any pastes. To reproduce a simple test case:

• Copy "bar" into clipboard
• Type in "foo"
• Paste clipboard
• Now press Undo a few times

You'll be left with "bar" - OLW and WLW "forget" about pastes and don't undo them. It's extremely destructive to editing, especially if you don't notice.

OLW won't open local drafts or published posts, throws an UnauthorizedAccessException

I get this exception trying to open (Windows) Live Writer drafts, or already published posts. The exception is:

System.UnauthorizedAccessException
"Access to the path 'C:\Users\hmemcpy\AppData\Local\Temp\OpenLiveWriter1894151082\supfiles2DD0C2\SpellingContext' is denied."

I traced the origin to these lines: https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter/blob/master/src/managed/OpenLiveWriter.PostEditor/BlogPostSupportingFileStorage.cs#L129-L130
It seems that CONTEXT_DICTIONARY_FILE is currently set to an empty string (per @shanselman's post, spell checking is currently removed), which creates an invalid path and causes FileStream to fail.

I commented out this method for now, but I'm not sure that's a good PR to send.

Azure AD support for authentication

Blogs can use Azure AD to authenticate users. OpenLiveWriter doesn't have support for that today, so a Workaround is to create credentials for each user. Azure AD Integration would be great.

@bursteg

Create an Open Live Writer gallery for plug-ins

Initial repository created for site here:
https://github.com/bsimser/openlivewritergallery

Need to discuss structure, features, and how plug-ins will fit in, etc.

@ScottIsAFool

Typepad blog themes are not working correctly

I have two blogs with the same theme:

http://blogs.kweaver.org/cs/ and http://blogs.kweaver.org/blog/

When I enable the theme in OpenLiveWriter I get a blank page, and cannot type on the page. However, can see HTML in source tab and can edit HTML, Once I remove the theme from OpenLiveWriter can see and edit post.

See http://screencast.com/t/JxXPiutKZr for a video showing the error.

No connection possible with Blogger?

Hi all.

First of all compliments for this effort. Totally awesome! However, I can't connect to my blog (http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/). During setup I am asked to enter the address of my blog, username and account. Every time the installer returns with the message 'The user name or password is incorrect. Please try again.'

Already I've set my Google account to allow apps with lower security. With Windows Live Writer this works.

Or will OWL only work when it supports OAuth 2, as stated on the blog of Scott Hanselman?

With kind regards,
Marnix Wolf

Add support for Squarespace Blog

Adding Squarespace as a blog provider would be fantastic. If I'm on a Windows box in the near future (or if I can get it running with .Net on Mac OS X) I'll look into submitting a PR myself.