Getting w.bloggar to use your site's theme

richardsplanet — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 21:51:50 +0000

I finally figured out how to get w.bloggar to use my site’s style settings to give me a more accurate preview.

Turns out the options for controlling the preview rendering are located under Tools → Blog Properties (or F2 using the keyboard shortcut):

Under the Preview tab, there are 6 edit areas to help you customize the look of your preview:

Body Tag: here you can set various attributes. There are some default values for you.

CSS Tag: here you can set the path to your site’s style sheet. This turned out not to be too useful for me – the WordPress theme I’m using sets the background colour to a very dark grey, then overrides that colour in the post. However, if you have a simple style sheet, or you want to knock up a simple version, you can always reference it here. In my case, I linked to my override style sheet – which contains the mods I made to the WordPress theme.

Title Style / Class: this allows you to set the font and size for the post title. I just made it bigger.

Post Style / Class: this allows you to set the font type and size for the post text. I just made mine bigger, the default size was too small for me.

Post Alignment: allows you to specify if your site left justifies, right justifies, centers, or full-justify your text (ok, full-justify was really awkward phrasing). This is obsolete (the way to do it is through CSS and not HTML), but, since it only affects the preview … who cares?

Post Width: allows you to specify how wide your site’s posts are in pixels. I set mine so the lines broke at about the same place using the font size I specified in Post Style / Class as my site. In this case, 1000 pixels did the trick.

This was the original “squinty eye” version (click for a larger image):

This is the updated version (click for a larger image):

Too bad it is no longer being developed. Despite some roughness, this client is definitely well beyond anything on offer now (aside from Windows Live Writer, but since WLW has an issue with increasing my image sizes, I’m sticking with w.bloggar) – it has a very flexible (albeit cramped) way to fine tune the Preview

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Getting Windows Live Writer to Detect Your Joomla! Theme

richardsplanet — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 17:27:18 +0000

This assumes you have installed and configured Windows Live Writer to work with your Joomla! site

This is for Windows Live Writer running on Windows XP.

There is a new version of Window Live Writer for Vista and Windows 7 (it is called Windows Live Writer 2011). Since I run XP, I can’t test test if these instructions work for Windows Live Writer 2011. However, I see no reason why they wouldn’t. On the other hand, perhaps Microsoft has some “clever” fix in the new version that renders these instructions obsolete (though, I doubt it).

Click on images for full sized versions.

Windows Live Writer (WLW) fails to detect the Joomla! template theme because it can’t see the temporary post it writes to detect the theme.

This happens because the home page of most Joomla! sites is the Front Page and when an article is posted, it is never posted to the Front Page. You always have to go to the Joomla! backend and manually publish an article to the Front Page. There are plugins which automatically publish articles to the Front Page, but I haven’t tested any.

To get WLW to detect the Joomla! theme we must make sure it can see the temporary post.

Determining Where Windows Live Writer is Trying to Write the Temporary Post

1) Select Refresh Theme from the View menu in WLW:

1a) WLW will begin to detect your theme:

1b) prompt you if it can post a temporary article (click on Yes) :

1c) and then report it failed to detect the theme:

2) Log into the Joomla! backend (administrator section) and select Article Trash from the Content menu:

3) Observe and note which section and category WLW tried to post the temporary article. The temporary post is easily identified because it begins with Temporary Post Used For Theme Detection followed by a lot of number and letters). In this case, the section is Web Development and the category is Joomla!:

Setting Up Joomla! so Windows Live Writer can See the Temporary Post

This is one of several ways to make the section / category of the temporary post the default one.

4) Select the Main Menu from the Menus menu:

5) Click on the New icon:

6) Click on Article menu item:

7) Select Category Blog Layout:

8) Give the menu entry a title (theme detect is good), and select the section / category discovered in step 3. Confirm that (1) the the menu item is being displayed in the Main Menu, (2) its parent item is Top, and (3) Published is set to Yes:

9) Click on Save:

10) Note and Remember which menu item is the default, then select the check box next to the newly added menu item and click on the yellow star to set it as the default:

Getting the Joomla! Theme

11) Select Refresh Theme from the View menu in WLW:

WLW will begin to detect your theme, prompt you if it can post a temporary article (click on Yes) and should successfully download your Joomla! theme:

Even though WLW successfully downloads your Joomla! theme, you may find that it does not correctly display it:

You can disable / enable use of the theme in the edit window by pressing Ctrl-F11.

Restoring Joomla to its Previous State

12) Select the previous default menu item noted in step 10 and click on the yellow star. Afterwards, disable the theme detect menu item by clicking on the green checkmark in the Published column:

If you change themes, you can Publish the detect theme menu item, set it to be the Default , refresh theme from WLW. If WLW fails to detect the theme, it is probable that it is publishing the temporary post to a different section / category. To fix that: determine which section / category it is publishing to (steps 1-3); click on the detect theme menu item (instead of the New icon in step 5); set the section category (step 8); retry to detect the theme with WLW.