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categoryId in WordPress 2.1 Breaks Ecto

As I said in an earlier post, WordPress 2.1 breaks ecto, a blog publishing app I and thousands of others use. I wrote to the developer Adriaan, and he's informed me that the fault lies with WordPress 2.1. Here's how.

When requesting new information in ecto (via "Refresh"), ecto attempts to retrieve the last 15-20 or so entries, their categories, their dates, etc. WordPress 2.1 sends this:

<member><name>categoryId</name><value><int>7</int></value></member>

It should send this:

<member><name>categoryId</name><value><string>7</string></value></member>

This was correct in previous versions, and according to Adriaan, the specs clearly indicate that categoryId is a string, not an int. A quick Google search quickly returns this page, which is over one month old.

I'll mention this on the IRC channel.

14 Responses to "categoryId in WordPress 2.1 Breaks Ecto"

  1. [...] Update: WordPress 2.1 breaks ecto with a bad categoryId type. [...]

  2. Specs can be found mirrored here: http://blog.kung-foo.tv/archives/001594.html

  3. Thanks for finding this and teasing it out...
    - geoff

  4. A patch to fix this is available at http://trac.wordpress.org/attachment/ticket/3662/3662-xmlrpc-categoryId.diff . Even though I am confident this will fix it, still would love to hear that the patch works for you 😉

  5. Oh, I almost forget... thank you Erik for presenting this so concisely! And sorry for us not catching this.

  6. [quote comment="39250"]A patch to fix this is available at http://trac.wordpress.org/attachment/ticket/3662/3662-xmlrpc-categoryId.diff . Even though I am confident this will fix it, still would love to hear that the patch works for you ;-)[/quote]

    It appears to work.

  7. Works like a charm. Thanks Lloyd.

  8. super. works fine
    Thanks in advance.

  9. [...] thanks to Erik Barzeski of NSLog();. He provided the solution to the incompatibility between the blog editor I’m using, ecto, and WordPress 2.1. The edit [...]

  10. Sparkzy, you are welcome for the solution that "Erik posted" 😉 Which I actually got from Andy Skelton.

  11. [...] Last week I took this site to WordPress 2.1 and much to my dismay realized that Ecto, my favorite XMLRPC blogging client no longer worked. It would let me post, but it was never able to update the category information for posts… It just hung with no error. I looked into it, and found out that Ecto expects the category information to be returned as a string, not an int. [...]

  12. [...] first entry shows how I can fix the problem (thank you, [...]

  13. Nice!
    Ecto has been downloading my blog entries again.

    Thank you, Erik and Llyod!

  14. [...] to figure out why Ecto wasn’t downloading posts. turns out WordPress 2.1 has a bug. Fix via NSLog(); Tags: Uncategorized Blog [...]