More Word blog authoring tidbits

In general, I prefer to sit back and watch the comments come in and respond to them in future blog posts. This means that some folks have to learn a little about delayed gratification. However, no one needs to worry about missing important information that only gets mentioned in the comment stream. So, here are a few answers to issues raised by recent comments.

Word blog feature: Is it a mode?

Fred wrote the following:

"In your screenshot for WordBlog UI I didn't see an 'exit' or close button. As you've removed the other Ribbon tabs (not quite sure I'm understanding why that was done rather than using some 'contextual' tabs as Jensen shows for things like working on pictures) is this a 'view' in Word, or an outside applet, or ???"

The blog feature is built on top of Word as a special mode. So, it is full blown Word, but based on the template we load we are scoping the user interface. It is not a view or an outside applet. Everything that we've done in creating the blog feature could have been done as a COM add-in by a developer outside of the Office team using the new Office extensibility model.

The user interface that appears on the blog templates surface is done using content controls. These controls are bound to our XML data store and the metadata for a post (post date, categories, title, blog account, etc) is stored there.

We'll be getting more details on these new features and how template authors and developers can use them to create exciting new solutions on top of Word.

Post management

Several people have asked if you can download posts from your server in order to edit them in Word. The answer is yes.

Also, the posts you create from scratch in Word or download from the server can be saved to your local drive for editing later. These are standard Word documents (.docx), but they will always remember that they are blog posts and so they'll have the appropriate ribbon commands available

OneNote integration

Chris Pratley pointed out that you can start your blog posts in OneNote and then transition to the new Word feature via a "Blog this…" command on the right click menu. You need to do a little leg work to enable this in beta 2, so make sure and read Chris' post.

Coming up next: Posts with images and other types of graphics.