How to edit blog.opml (or any other outline) using another outliner?

[gruber]

The "Blogging in Drummer" docs mention:

You can use any outliner you like, as long as it produces OPML as output.

But I haven't found a way to actually do this? I'd like to try using OmniOutliner to edit blog.opml from my Mac.

[scripting]

@gruber -- thanks for posting this question here, it's a very important topic.

The quote is about Old School, not Drummer, even though the document is entitled Blogging in Drummer.

If you wanted to use Omni to blog the same way you use Drummer, I'm pretty sure you can and also pretty sure it wouldn't take a lot of work to set it up.

To build your blog, Drummer calls a separate Node.js app called DrummerCMS. The source code is available, it's pretty easy to set up, if you're a programmer.

If you want to go down that road, I'll help. Also @papascott, one of our testers has already set up a DrummerCMS installation, so we know it's possible for people other than me to do it. :smile:

Electric Drummer

When you first asked this question privately I was thinking it might go another way. There's a desktop version of Drummer that I haven't released to testers yet, but it's what I use to write my blog, and to write change notes and the Drummer docs. I like it because I have the full Mac OS to work with, which makes it possible for me to hook it up to other apps.

E/D also has an image uploader built in, which addresses another one of your questions. You put the bar cursor on a headline you want to attach an image to, save the image to a folder that it watches, and it uploads it and fills in the image attribute for the headline. I think it's what you were looking for in the workflow.

The hangup with E/D has to do with versions of Electron. I wrote up the question I have the other day, but haven't received any help yet.

Even though there are still some outstanding big issues for E/D it is usable. I use it all day every day. It's where I plan to migrate all my remaining Frontier stuff so I can get over to Linux because the Mac boat is very unstable for me because I rely on a product that no longer runs on their latest system software. Oy.

[alexjj]

Whilst not strictly addressing your question it can be used without having to host anything yourself... you can include OPML files from another URL which then will build as part of drummer when you build the blog.

I've not tested this completely, but you could manage the entire content in another application with just an include in the blog.opml in drummer. You'd need to host it somewhere public of course. You can also call building your blog by visiting the url http://drummercms.scripting.com/build?blog=<your-twitter-handle> That is not true, you'll need to visit drummer to get it to read the include.

[scripting]

@alexjj -- have you checked out whether DrummerCMS goes into includes?

you're trying to help someone, that's good, but you shouldn't present as fact something you're guessing about.

[alexjj]

@alexjj -- have you checked out whether DrummerCMS goes into includes?

It does not, so the user will have to visit drummer, expand that section for it to include the other data and then build the blog. So not quite the hands off approach as I first thought, however, the include functionality may still be beneficial in allowing another outliner (or outlines generated elsewhere) to be used without selfhosting drummercms and a few other steps.

I was considering this for collecting some other data to automatically include, and so remembered this issue.

[scripting]

@alexjj — ok you’re obviously going pretty deep, keep truckin..