Editing posts in WordPress backend editor is a pain. Much of the functionality of Emacs editing that I have developed over the years are not useful there at all, not to mention the extreme speed boost when editing HTML with Emacs. Weblogger is an Emacs package to use to post to WordPress with a few finger tips.

Setting up Weblogger

The setup is easy.

Download the xml-rpc.el and weblogger.el mentioned in this EmacsWiki page
Copy the files to somewhere Emacs can find.

In the .emacs file, add the following:

(require 'xml-rpc)
(require 'weblogger)

Use weblogger-setup-weblog to setup your blog.

Weblogger Usage

To use Weblogger, simply type M-x weblogger-start-entry.

After setting up the header (title, keywords, etc), it is useful to use C-c C-e to toggle in between body and header editing. One thing to note is that, in the body editing mode, the function weblogger-toggle-edit-body is actually not bounded to the keystroke C-c C-e. You have to bind it yourself or type the command.

During editing the body, the post under editing can be saved as a mail message (in the ~/Mail/drafts folder). After you finish editing the post, toggle back to the header and use C-c C-s to publish it.

Bugs and Feature Request

It seems that the category / tags features are not supported by now. The keywords I entered for the post appear no where in WordPress.

Also, with one try with this extension, I found that a new save of a brand new post to my blog flushed a previous post into Trash folder. I don’t know if it is a one time thing or not. Let me use it more and watch.