Windows Live Writer Tip: Fixing WordPress Theme Issues

I have been wanting to get Live Writer to work properly with my Breaking News Theme from WarriorThemes for a while now and just haven’t had any success.  My issue was that it imported the theme, but when it imported I simply couldn’t write any information in the post, it was like a big image was in front of all my written content and I was stuck with an unusable blank page with no ability to type content into it.

The theme developers in the forums told me that they used something called “Theme Fixer” which was written Brandon Turner and can be found and downloaded here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brandonturner/archive/2009/08/16/broken-theme-in-windows-live-writer-you-can-fix-it.aspx

They claimed that this would fix the issue and did for them, but the Theme Fixer just doesn’t work for me on my computer.  I constantly get the following error when I try to execute the file.

I am using Windows 7 64bit Ultimate with Service Pack 1 (which is what they were using too I believe) and I tried using compatibility mode and setting it to run as Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 pre-service pack 1 but nothing helped resolve the immediate crash from occurring.

This caused me to find and seek other ways to try and fix my Live Writer theme issues and I didn’t find a way to get Live Writer to work with my main theme, but I was able to get Live Writer to use another blog’s theme for my DragonBlogger.com blog which helped me at least get something presentable and formatted so that I wasn’t just drafting posts on a blank page without knowing how they would look with a 550px wide post area restriction.

I found the following tips were helpful:

Use the Default WordPress Theme with Live Writer

One really simple thing to do is temporarily switch your blog to the default WordPress TwentyTen theme, then just have Live Writer setup the theme and you will at least have a good clean theme appearance in Live Writer.  After you are done you can simply switch your blog back to the theme you were using and you are done.  This is easy and no fuss other than temporarily making your visitors see the wrong theme for your blog.

Disable All WordPress Plugins and then Import Live Writer Theme

This tip actually helped many bloggers as some of the plugins which affect styling or add additional CSS to a blog can affect the Live Writer theme import.  This unfortunately didn’t solve my issue for the BreakingNews Theme which was able to import but the rendering of the content and CSS in Live Writer was so off that I just couldn’t write articles in it.

Try Fixes Recommended by MindTweaks

I went over to MindTweaks and tried the recommendations for the xmlrpc.php file and the .htaccess file but none of those tips worked for me as well.  Also warning if you try modifying your .htaccess file you can cause an outage for your site by playing with the SecFilterInheritance filter if your Apache isn’t configured to use mod_security and only your hosting provider will likely know.

My Only Solution

In the end the only solution I could use was to switch my blog to temporarily using the default WordPress theme, importing it into Live Writer and then switching my blog theme back.  My Live Writer doesn’t show my accurate blog theme, but I modified the CSS to limit the post area size to 550px so that at least when typing in Live Writer my sentences conform to the same area restrictions as my blog.

-Dragon Blogger