With the 1.1 release of the Performancing for Firefox (PFF) extension, Blogzerk (and all Blogware-powered) blogs are now supported. This means you can install the extension in Firefox and have a nice, quick way to post to your blog. PFF supports all the basic HTML tags and also recognizes your existing categories. I'm posting this using PFF.

Here's some other new features (see this post for a full list):

New features

• More Technorati Support
• Delicious integration
• Trackback support (including auto-discovery)
• Draft support (and default to draft option)
• Ping support
• Statusbar Icon Enhancments (drag and drop)
• More Settings Options

Hot on the heels of our forum post on adding a "Post to del.icio.us!" link to your blog, I've added a new forum post on adding a "Digg This!" link to your blog's article and category templates. Check it out. If you like it, be sure to Digg This!

I've just added an article to the Blogzerk Forums on adding a custom login form component to your blog. This takes that code for the standard login component (which isn't customizable in Blogware) and extends it to add a link to log in to the User's Control Panel or request a forgotten password.

I just posted an article in the Blogzerk Forums on how to add a "Post to del.icio.us!" link to your blog's category and article view. Check it out on the Blogzerk Blog.

Thanks to Vic Correro writing at ProBlogger for the inspiration. Much like him, I've been wanting to do this for a while but needed a kick.

If you are using Firefox for your browser (and you really should be!), you can use the Xinha Here! Firefox extension to use Xinha as the WYSIWYG HTML editor for your posts. Xinha supports more HTML features than the Blogware Rich Text Editor (RTE). For example, inserting a new table and formatting it is easily done with Xinha. There are many more formatting and other options that make this editor a breeze to use. Note that I'll use Blogware and Blogzerk interchangably here since Blogware is the backend that powers Blogzerk.

Pros and Cons 
The benefits of using this instead of the RTE are table support, undo and redo, quick tags, and pretty much all of the other features it supports. Also, you can use the extension to do WYSIWYG editing of article excerpts--even if you use the RTE!

The main drawback to using this instead of the RTE is that it doesn't integrate with the RTE image chooser that lets you quickly choose an existing photo from an album or upload and choose a new photo. Instead, you would need to use the File Manger in the Publisher's Control Panel to upload your image and then use your browser to copy the URL to the image to use in Xinha.

Installing the Extension
To install the extension, go to the installation page and follow the instructions there. You will need to restart Firefox after installation. 

 

Configuring Blogware
Since Xinha Here! relies on using a TEXTAREA field to write the HTML it generates to, you'll need to configure Blogware to not use the RTE. To do this, log in to the Publisher's Control Panel and go to Settings and Security/Publishing Defaults/Advanced. Uncheck the option for using the Rich Text Editor and save your changes.

Go to Settings and Secutiry/Publishing Defaults/Posting Defaults. Uncheck the option for Convert line breaks and save your changes.

 

Posting an Article
To use Xinha Here! to create an article, click the Post link in the Publisher's Control Panel. In the Article Body text box, right-click (Ctrl+click on Mac) in the text box and select Xinha Here! from the context menu. When you have created your article in Xinha, click OK to save the HTML to the Article Body text box. Be sure to save your article!

 

Editing an Article
To edit an article, go to the article in the control panel. Right-click in the Article Body text field and select Xinha Here! from the context menu. When you are don, click OK to save the HTML and be sure to save your article!

 

More Info
You can use the Options button to select which formatting toolbars you'll see. Use the help icon in the toolbar to get a list of keyboard shortcuts.

Happy posting!

This article was posted using the Xinha Here! extension. Thanks to John at Blogharbor for suggesting this editor and Om Malik for his article on it to get me jump started.