Hi Rob,
Thanks for your post and your interest in metaPost. I hope you've had a chance to download and try the Community Edition. There are currently 4 providers (think plugin) for metaPost, but more are on the way.
- Text/HTML
- Ventrian News Articles
- Blog
- FAQs
This turned out to be longer than expected, so if you just want to see one cool feature that's coming soon in the Professional Edition, check out this post to our blog.
One of the unique features of the metaPost infrastructure is it's ability to be implemented by third party developers by simply implementing an interface (IMetaPostProvider). metaPost will automatically detect new providers as they are added to the system. No configuration is necessary. On the feature side, metaPost is currently the only DNN module available which supports the full feature set of Windows Live Writer. The closest provider to take advantage of this yet is the Ventrian News Articles module which supports creating multiple article pages and setting custom News Article properties, such as the featured or secure options, right from within Live Writer. I believe metaPost is also the only product available which supports unique manifest files for each provider so that the feature set in WLW changes depending on whether you're writing a blog entry or adding a new article with multiple pages. metaPost also has full support for retrieving the site styles for each of the providers, which means you see your margins and styles in Windows Live Writer as you write the post (F11 in WLW. Custom steps are required to get this to work with the FAQ provider).
Here's a list of the features available in Windows Live Writer that metaPost makes available to each provider on a per provider basis:
- Keywords
- Comment Policy
- Ping Policy
- Trackback URLs
- Slugs (SEO friendly, shortened URL titles)
- Hiearchical Categories
- New Categories
- Multiple or Single Category Selection
- Custom Publish Date
- Author
- 3 Levels of Content (Excerpt, Content, Extended Content)
- Password
- Pages (Listing, Adding, Editing, Deleting and Assigning Parent)
- Hiearchical Pages
- Page Order
- Post as Draft
- Custom Buttons
- Branding of Windows Live Writer using Watermarks and Icons
- Ability to Change Some Default Text used by Windows Live Writer
- Force Title Field
Any of these properties can be configured for any provider, which really opens the door to some exciting possibilities for WLW DNN integration and which is a feature that I don't believe is implemented by any other product on the market.
In addition to these WLW features, we've added some custom features to metaPost to either fill in the gaps for modules that don't have support for these features or just to make it fun to use the product. Some of these features are coming soon in the Professional Edition which will not place a "powered by metaPost" attribution image in the footer of each post and which will support premium features that we add as the product develops. The Community Edition will continue to have the current feature set and will have access to all future providers. Because the architecture is open, we hope that third party developers will create metaPost providers that are available either as a value-add to their product or as a standalone product that can be purchased. The Community Edition release cycle will continue with the Professional Edition, so you can be assured that both versions will continue to evovle together. Ok, got lost. Unique features:
- Trackback and Pingback support - built in support for both Trackback and Pingback, which is great news for module developers who don't want to write an implementation of these social media services. This is currently used in the blog module to provide automatic pingback detection from WLW (Note: you have to select allow in the pings dropdown in WLW to initiate auto pingback detection. Also note up front that we can only provide limited support for this feature due to the differences in implementation out there on the different blogging platforms).
- Image Management (Professional Edition) - metaPost keeps track of the images saved in each entry regardless of provider. A future interface will be added to the Professional Edition to allow administrators to manage images by viewing orphaned images as well as images by provider and post.
- Auto Image Expander (Professional Edition) - metaPost fills in the gaps for Windows Live Writer by using a small JavaScript library to add stunning expand effects to images. See it in action here!
- Custom Footer for each Provider (Professional Edition) - An administrator can configure a custom footer to be added to the bottom of each post. This is configurable at the provider level and is a great place to include Social Media Optimization (SMO) features such as the bookmark this link.
- Portal Access (Professional Edition) - turn metaPost on or off at the portal level and even keep track of whether your customer has paid and when their subscription expires.
Let us know if there's a feature you're looking for!
Thanks,
Don