One of the common features in today’s content management systems is to provide you the ability to create your own blog in your website. Also, having a blog is one of the very often needed features for various types of websites. Out of the box, Orchard gives you this, so you can create your own blog in your Orchard website on a pretty easy way. Besides the fact that you can very easily create your own blog, Orchard also gives you some extra features in relation with the support of blogging, such as connecting third-party client applications (e.g. Windows Live Writer) to your blog, so that you can publish blog posts remotely. You can already find all the information provided in this blog post on the http://orchardproject.net website, however I thought it would be nice to make summary in one blog post.

I assume you have already installed Orchard and you are already familiar with its environment and administration dashboard. If you haven’t, please read this blog post first.

CREATE YOUR BLOG

First of all, go to Orchard Administration Dashboard and click on Blog in the left menu

Once you are there, you will see the following screen

Fill the form with all needed data, as in the following example

and click Save

Right after, you should see the following screen

Click New post, and add your first post. After that, go to Homepage (click Your Site in the top-left corner) and you should see the Blog link in your menu

After clicking on Blog, you will be directed to the following page

Once you click on My First Post, you will see that your blog already supports commenting ability (you can enable/disable this from Administration dashboard in your blog settings)

1. Added comment
2. Adding new comment
3. Submit comment

So, with following these steps, you have already setup your blog in your Orchard website.

CONNECT YOUR BLOG WITH WINDOWS LIVE WRITER

Since many bloggers prepare their blog posts using third-party client applications, like Windows Live Writer, its very useful if your blog engine has the ability to work with these third-party applications and enable them to make remote posting and publishing.

The client applications use XmlRpc interface in order to have the ability to manage and publish the blogs remotely.

What is great about Orchard is that it gives you out of the box the XmlRpc and Remote Publishing modules. What you only need to do is to enable these features from the Modules in your Orchard Administration Dashboard.

So, lets go through the steps of enabling and making your previously created blog able to work with third-party client applications for blogging.

1. Go to Administration Dashboard and click the Modules

After clicking the Modules, you will see the following page:

As you can see, you already have Remote Blog Publishing and XmlRpc features for Content Publishing, but both are disabled by default. So, if you click Enable only on Remote Blog Publishing, you will see both of them enabled at once since they are dependent features. After you click Enable, if everything is Ok, the following message should be displayed:

So, now we have the featured enabled and ready... The next thing you need to do is to open Windows Live Writer.

First, open Windows Live Writer and in your Blog Accounts, click on Add blog account

In the next window, chose Other services

After that, click on your Blog link in the Orchard website and copy the URL, my URL (on localhost development server) is: http://localhost:8191/blog

Then, add your login credentials you use to login in Orchard and click Next.

After that, if you have setup everything successfully, the Windows Live Writer will do the rest

Once it finishes, you will have window where you can specify the name of your blog you have just connected your Windows Live Writer to...

Then... you are done. You can see Windows Live Writer has detected the Orchard theme I am using

After you finish with the blog post, click on Publish and refresh the Blog page in your Orchard website

You see, we have the blog post directly posted from Windows Live Writer to my Orchard Blog.

I hope this was useful blog post.

Regards,
Hajan

Reference and other useful posts:

• Build incredible content-driven websites using Orchard CMS
• Create blog on your site with Orchard CMS
• Blogging using Windows Live Writer in your Orchard CMS Blog
• Orchard Website