WB Editor is one of a handful of windows-based desktop blog editing and publishing tools. The review of the newly released WB Editor version 2.
WB Editor provides you with a 14-day full featured trial period after you which you will need to pay a nominal $19.95 to purchase a full license for it.
WB Editor allows you to connect to different types of blog server applications and content management systems (CMS), provides remote post management, and WYSIWYG Editing.
WB Editor supports the blogger API and MetaWeblog API. API stands for "application programming interface" and allows one software program to communication with another software program. In this case a blog editor is programmed to talk to various blog server applications.
Additional features of interest in WB Editor are support for unicode standard UTF-8 for transmitting and receiving non-English content, Image Updload with thumbnail creation, Trackback Ping Tool, support for Blog Categories and more.
Installation & Configuraton
Installation is that typical windows installation. I downloaded the .exe file and clicked it to run the application installer. Installation took just a moment and did not require any user intervention.
When you lauch WB Editor for the first time, the Setup Wizard runs so that can configure your initial blog account for composing, editing and publishing blog articles.
I had to provide the name of my blog, blog account login information and the blogging api URL information for remote publishing and management to my blog server. All blog hosting services aren't supported with all blog editing and publishing tools like WB Editor. You should check the blog editing software to see what blog hosting services are supported. If your blog server software is not supported, then check with your blog server software maker for API support for that platform.
If your blog server software is not supported by WB Editor or another blog editor tool BUT it doesn support the blogger API or the API of of another blog server application then you can do a customer set up. This is what I need to do with BlogHarbor. BlogHarbor isn't supported out of the box with WB Editor but BlogHarbor does support the blogger API and the MoveableType API. I configured WB Editor to support my BlogHarbor blog via the MoveableType API. See image below.
WB Editor supports the following blog hosting services or Content Management systems:
b2, Blogger, Drupal, XOOPS, Moveable Type, PMachine, PostNuke, dasBlog, and WordPress.
If your blog server software or CMS isn't supported you can easily configure the tool by selecting "custom" during account setup. What you will need is the API URL settings required to communicate with your blog software along with your account login credentials.
Here is a list of Blog server software and CMS API configuration information. This information is provided to your blog editor sofware and how you configure these settings will be different among blog editors when you are configuring your custom settings. Note that the API string is relative to the path or directory you have your blog software installed on your server if you are hosting your own application and this applies to the _PATH information as well.
I know this sounds very techie or geeky but you'll appreciate this list if you find yourself trying out a blog editor that requires a custom configuration your blog server. You can reply to this post with any questions for clarity if you like.
Blog Server APIs:
TypePad
www.typepad.com
/t/api
port: 80
Blogger
api.blogger.com
/api
port: 80
Moveable Type
WWW.YOURHOST.COM
/MT_PATH/mt-xmlrpc.cgi
port: 80
WordPress
WWW.YOURHOST.COM
/WP_PATH/xmlrpc.php
port: 80
SquareSpace
www.squarespace.com
/do/process/external/PostInterceptor
port: 80
PMachine
WWW.YOURHOST.COM
/pm/pmserver.php
port: 80
LiveJournal
www.livejournal.com
/interface/blogger
port: 80
DeadJournal
www.deadjournal.com
/interface/blogger
port: 80
dasBlog
WWW.YOURHOST.COM
/BLOG_PATH/blogger.aspx
port: 80
Blogware
www.blogware.com
/xmlrpc.cgi
port: 80
b2 b2
22blog.com
/YOURFOLDER/xmlrpc.php
port: 80
Once you completed the configuration details for your blog server account you are then asked for a "setup link pattern" to help you WB Editor determine with blog account to use when you use WB Editor with RSS Aggregators like FeedDemon, or RSS Bandit.
Next, your finished and ready to start blogging...
WB Editor has a please interface and it shows provides you with a snapshot of each blog you have an account configured for.
Blogging with WB Editor
Once you are presented with your list blogs you simply select the snapshot of the blog you want to edit or publishing articles to. The Editor interface is clean and intuitive for used to standard word processing software interfaces most notably Microsoft Word users. Standard editing and formatting is available from bolding to underlining and text alignment. WB Editor has a few build-in skins that are only color changes and nothing more than that.
You also have a selection of plug-ins that extend the features of WB Editor. There are additional plug-ins that are said to be underway although some of the current plug-ins provides features that in my opinion would be standard in most programs. This however seems minimal since the features are available and active with the application. The MoveableType plug-in is a nice addition.
The WB Editor Ping Tool is a very nice feature and it is the only blog editor I know that has this. You can also enter the url of the blog and it will go out and automatically discover the ping url and it will allow you to ping multiple urls as well.
You can easily download groups of posts from your blog server and save them disk, you can save any post you are currently composing to disk, open posts from files on your disk, print and create a new post...all of which is normally a single click away to execute.
You have a choice of WYSIWYG composition or raw HTML code composition and search and replace functions as well.
The Image Upload feature works really well and extremely fast with minimal size images and broadband connectivity which describes my connection setup. You post categories are easily selectable at the bottom of the text editing window. After you write your article you simply select your category and publish instantly to your blog server or publishing instantly to your blog server as a draft for later publishing to your live blog site.
The previous version of WB Editor supported posting to muliple categories with WordPress but it did not handle republishing of that same article if you pulled it from the server to edit. I not sure if quite knew what to do with the multiple categories after an inital publishing to those categories. I was a quirk that I found rather irrating at times. I haven't testing it yet under WB Editor version 2.
I think it would be a great idea to have the program prompt you to discard your current post when you select the "create a new post" option. Right, if you do this and you currently have text typed into the editor, that text is completed discarded. If prompting the user in this case doesn't make sense, then the program should at least create another tabbed window with that text still available. If someone wants to write out more than one thought or they accidentally click the "new post" button they are out of luck.
The program also needs to also close out any post that has already been published to the blog server to avoid any accidents there as well. This works better for and I've become accustomed to this from another tool that clears that text editor once the post has already been published. While I haven't looked deeply into the blogger API called it would be great to be able to publish a scheduled post as well. This isn't a shortcoming the WB Editor as not editor I've used to date allows you to publish to the future.
My biggest issue with WB Editor is that when I compose text and publish the formatting doesn't stay intact when you viewed in the blog server text editor. When you use WB Editor in HTML mode you must make sure you use your
tags and
tags to control and maintain your paragraph breaks. If you don't do this and you switch to WYSIWYG view, you text will run together as one hugh paragraph. You can avoid this by simple using the WYSIWYG editor. BUT...either way, you text will be one huge paragraph when viewed through your blog server text editor.
Your published content will look just fine and exactly as composed in WB Editor. These reason why this is probably a grip for me is that when posts are exported for repurposing, you have a glob of text and html code. You have to drop the text in a editor like TextPad or NoteTab to strip the HTML tags out then you'll have to format the contents of each post make with WB Editor. This is probably a rare even for most but something to think about especially if your blog content will eventually lend itself to becoming some type of information product at a later time.
Conclusion
WB Editor is easy to use desktop blog editor and publishing tool. The interface is intuitive, clean and pleasing eyes. In some ways it communicates quality and other ways it lets you know that there it still has some growing to do. The program seems a bit sluggish in places particularly when expanding the text editor window to hide the side bar and category fields.
Using a blog editor is a pretty straight forward process of writing and article and publishing to your blog server. However, WB Editor should still provide online help. The HELP menu option only yields a link to the WB Editor website, version checking and "about". The BlogThis support for FeedDemon needs to be improved also.
Overall, this is a decend product to live with for basic blogging from your desktop. WB Editor delivers a time saving way to edit and publish multiple blogs from a single interface. While I do have my grips about how the text editor is implemented, WB Editor does with it does pretty well and operates as advertised.
If you are new to blogging and you are looking for a family word processor styled editing tool for your blog, WB Editor is certainly worth your time and dime.
On a scale of 1 to 10 in price, performance and practicality for bloggers I give WB Editor a solid 7.
