While Orchard provides a simple way to write blog posts using the built-in features of the admin panel, many people prefer to author posts using a client application, such as Open Live Writer. These clients use an XML-RPC interface to publish posts remotely, and offer additional capabilities like saving offline drafts (for example, to write your blog posts on an airplane and sync-up your site later).

To enable Remote Blog Publishing, click Features in the Orchard admin panel.

To use Open Live Writer with Orchard, you need to enable the Remote Blog Publishing feature. To enable Remote Blog Publishing click the Enable link on the feature box. Note that if you haven't already created a blog on your site, you'll want to do so.

Now, launch Live Writer from your Start menu in Windows.

Choose Add blog account... from the Blogs menu.

Choose Other blog service from the available options and click Next.

Type the URL to your Orchard blog, along with the admin user name and password that you defined when you set-up Orchard for the first time.

Note

It is possible to publish using other XML-RPC aware client applications, but you might have to provide the URL of the XML-RPC endpoint rather than the blog URL. For example, http://myimaginaryorchardsite.com/xmlrpc.

Live Writer will connect to your blog in order to read the XML-RPC capabilities that Orchard supports and download the current Theme (for previewing posts before publishing). If you are prompted to create a temporary post during this step, select "Yes" in the dialog.

After Live Writer is configured, click Finish.

Write a title and some content for your blog post in the Live Writer editor area.

You can also insert pictures to your post using the Insert Picture button on the toolbar.

To edit the URL for your post, select View / Properties in the Live Writer menu.

The Slug input appears at the bottom of the editor, where you can type the portion of the URL that refers to this post.

To preview your post in the context of the currently applied Theme in Orchard, select the Preview tab in Live Writer. When you are satisfied with the way your post looks, click the Publish button.

Live Writer publishes your post, and will automatically load the URL for the post in your browser for viewing.