Have you ever tried writing a hReview in Windows Live Writer (WLW)?  Its not easy.  There is no support built into the GUI for the microformat, I couldn’t find any publicly available plugins to add the capability (though some have apparently been written), and if you try to write the review by hand you have to do so in the HTML Code view lest Windows Live Writer helpfully modify or remove a critical div or span tag for you and break the data format.  As I said – its not easy.

This is a problem because microformats are gradually gaining momentum in the blogosphere.  In particular the hReview microformat is proving useful for blogs:

hReview is a simple, open, distributed format, suitable for embedding reviews (of products, services, businesses, events, etc.) in HTML, XHTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML.

Writing your review in this format allows services such as Pingerati and LouderVoice.to aggregate and redistribute your content, giving your views access to a wider audience.

In my search for a hReview plugin I stumbled across this post by one of the Microsoft team developing Windows Live Writer.  It announced a Dynamic Template plugin for calling customisable templates including dynamic content and forms for entering field values.  This seemed my best option for quickly adding some level of hReview capability to Windows Live Writer.

The result is the form you see here.  I’ve found the best approach to applying it is to enter the fundamentals of the review (item, type, URL, ratings, tags, etc) via the form, then finishing the details of the Overview and Description sections of the review by hand in your favourite WLW view.  This lets the template deal with the fiddly pieces of the hReview format (correctly specifying the classes, and span and div tags) without forcing you to spend too much time entering content directly into the restrictive form fields.  As templates are uni-directional – you can’t "round trip" from the hReview form into WLW then back into the form again – you will need to use the HTML Code view if you want to edit the ratings later   Please note you must be in HTML Code view when invoking the template or the abbr tag in the posts title will be damaged (appears to be a Dynamic Template limitation).

You can download the template and sample stylesheets below.  The easiest way to install the template is to double click the .wlwtemplate file after downloading, assuming the Dynamic Template plugin is already installed. The template file needs to be copied into your Application Data\WLWTemplates directory before the Dynamic Template plugin will recognise it.

If you need any additional information about the template’s installation or usage then please refer to its project page.  A post created using the template and styles above can be found here. 

If you have any questions or feedback about the template then please leave a comment below.