And you thought Windows Live Writer Development had stalled... NOPE! A new WLW CTP is now available, with some cool new features and plugin goodness

Writer Zone - Technical Preview: Now Available for Download 

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New Features

You’ll also get an early look at some improvements and new features we’ve been working on:

Video and Image Publishing Enhancements

• Upload videos to Soapbox
• Image cropping and tilting
• Additional border styles
• Support for LightBox and other image previewing effects (like Slimbox, Smoothbox, and others)
• Support for centering images

Editing Enhancements

• Auto Linking
• Smart quotes/typographic characters
• Word count

UI Improvements

• Revised main toolbar
• Tabs for view switching
• Improved category control with search/filtering

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Writer Dev Zone - Technical Preview: Now Available for Download

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The biggest changes are the additions of two new plugin types: publish notification hooks and header/footer content sources. Publish notification hook plugins allow you to execute code before and after Writer posts content to a weblog. They can examine the contents of the post and have the option to cancel the publish operation. Header/footer source plugins insert headers or footers during publishing. Headers and footers are not directly editable by Writer users and do not appear in Writer’s editing views, but are visible in the Preview view (and of course, on the published blog post). 

In the SDK Technical Preview you’ll find the following:

• New SDK Features.doc – Detailed descriptions of the new plugin types. (Start here!)
• SDK Reference.chm – Reference documentation for the entire Windows Live Writer API.
• Samples – Source and binaries for two sample plugins:
  • Twitter Notify – Prompts you to make a Twitter status update after publishing a post
  • DiggThis – Automatically adds a DiggThis button or badge to each post

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YEAH! My favorite blogging tool is still alive and well!

The install over my existing version was smooth and easy and all my settings, etc seemed to upgrade with no issues. (I’m writing this post in the new version ;)

While the new features are cool (the tabbed view switching being one of nicer ones IMHO), I’m most excited about the new plugin features. The Pre/Post publish notification is something I can see using in a number of ways… Since these provide access to the permalink to the post, you can now do some pretty cool stuff. For example, you can write a plugin that as soon as the post was successfully posted, poke that new post URL directly into your Twitter feed… And that’s just one thing that comes to mind.

Scott Lovegrove has had his hands on a private beta for a bit and has already written a number of cool WLW Plugins using the new features. Make sure you check out these posts, New Writer Plugins Using The New SDK and The New Live Writer SDK

 

Here are some quick screen shots…