Live Writer Plugins for Comment Management, Custom Fields in WordPress

WordPress users now have new reasons to embrace Windows Live Writer to publish their posts. Brandon Turner unveiled a new plugin at WordCamp Seattle on Sept 26, 2009 which adds three vital features to WordPress – Comment Management, Custom Field and the ability to change Blog Title and Tagline.

Comment Management:

Comment Management option inside Live Writer allows you to do three things – Moderate new comments, Delete Approved Comments, Check Spam and Approve/Delete them. This feature is very valuable since you no longer need to log into your WordPress Dashboard to manage your comments.

Change Blog Title and Tagline + Twitter Import Feature:

This feature allows you to Change your blog’s title and tagline from within Live Writer’s interface. Optionally, there is a feature to import your tweets from Twitter and use them as your tagline. This is very convenient if you publish a personal blog and wish to keep your tagline dynamically updated based on your Twitter status.

Custom Fields:

Custom Fields within Live Writer interface is also a super-handy feature, if you have some theme specific feature or SEO plugin which rely on this feature of WordPress (read more about Custom Fields on WordPress Codex). You no longer need to manually edit the post on your blog to add custom fields, which can help you save a lot of time.

How to add custom fields from Live Writer: You’ll be asked if you want to enable Custom Fields when you click publish for the first time after installing the plugin. Here’s what you’ll have to do next:

“Enter the key/values for the custom field in the grid below. And when you are done you can close the dialog, it will save the custom fields to your blog. The next time you come back to this dialog, there will be links on the top with the keys you have entered in the past. This way, if you always insert the same custom fields, you will only have to enter them the first time. When selected on a custom field, you can click the checkbox. This will generate a snippet of PHP code which you can use in your WordPress theme to display the custom field” – Windows Live Writer Team Blog

Installing the Plugin:

All the three features come in one DLL file. You need download WordPressPlugin.dll and copy it to your Live Writer’s plugins directory which is generally located at:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins (For 64-bit)

C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins (For x86)

[Source: Windows Live Writer Team]