After the release of the 2nd beta of Windows Live Writer, one of the other changes I noticed was that the blog side panel was now customised for WordPress.  It had a little WordPress icon & it knew where the admin page was located.  This, I discovered, was due to the fact that WLW now has an API for customising this panel with a manifest file. The WordPress.com blogs already have one done for them, with custom buttons to their comments & stats, but I figured, why not the rest of us WordPress users too. 

So I have a very beta plugin that will generate a wlwmanifest file for your blog.  It utilises a lot of the imagery from the WordPress.com one, so I hope they don’t mind.  You can download the plugin here. Here’s the page for it on WordPress.org.

This is very much a case of me working out an idea.  If you have any suggestions for what this can do, please leave a comment.  I’ve got a couple of ideas, but we’ll see how it goes.  It’s all together possible that this may be in the pipeline for the WordPress core, and that would be great.

[inspired by Tim Heuer's subtext version]