Joe Cheng, member of the Windows Live Writer team, just unveiled his first publicly available Windows Live Writer plugin…

I’ve just released my first (publicly available) Windows Live Writer plugin: Dynamic Template. It lets you write mini-plugins from snippets of C# and HTML, and reuse them within Windows Live Writer.

It’s sort of a meta-plugin plugin. He has a screencast on how to use it, but I’ll post a few screenshots of it in action here.

The plugin adds a new Insert Template option in the sidebar.

Insert Template Option

Clicking on this brings up a dialog with a list of templates.

Insert Template

Click New to bring up the template editor. I’m going to create one for wrapping sections of html with the <code></code> tags.

First, I’ll name the template.

Naming the New Template

Then I’ll edit the template. Since this template just adds HTML around a selection and doesn’t require that I ask for user input, I don’t need to create a variable.

Editing the Template

And now I can just select some text, click on Insert Template… and double click Code. Nice!

Another useful template is one that Joe calls Htmlize.

Edit Template Htmlize

As you can see, you can call some functions from within a template. This one is useful for converting something like <sup>blah</sup> into ^blah^ while in the Web Layout or Normal mode.

Watch Joe’s Screencast for a demo of a template that takes in user input as part of the template. There’s also some documentation located here. This is a pretty handy plugin that’ll be great for automating a variety of html snippets I use often.