Although OpenOffice.org is first and foremost a desktop productivity suite, you can use its ability to connect to external database management systems like MySQL to create rather nifty solutions that take the productivity suite beyond the limits of the desktop. For example, you can plug OpenOffice.org into the MySQL back end of a blogging engine and write and publish blog posts directly from within OpenOffice.org Writer. It might sound like a job for a skilled programmer, but you can do this with just a couple of simple OpenOffice.org macros.

Putting the Pieces Together

To make this project more manageable, I'll break it into several steps. To begin, you have to install and configure a blog application. In theory, you can use whichever one you like, as long as it uses MySQL as its back end. In practice, however, you should pick a simple blogging engine that uses a simple MySQL database. For this project, I will use a slightly tweaked version of the Bilboblog microblogging application (Figure 1) [1]. To store content, it uses a single table with only three fields, which makes it a perfect candidate for this project.

Figure 1: Bilboblog makes a perfect candidate for the coding project.

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