IND-Web.com

Our various blogging packages are supposed to offer our users all the great features of WordPress including use of the XML-RPC API.

XML-RPC is a remote procedure call protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism.

Taken from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – XML-RPC.

This API allows our users to connect and use their blog using a blogging client for either their desktop or mobile phone.

If you are unfamiliar with the term Desktop blogging client, think of it as a tool to blog with application instead of logging into your Blogger or WordPress. In fact, a lot of bloggers and probloggers has been using them for quite a while and there’s tonnes of reason why they love it. Desktop blogging clients allows one to manage multiple blogs of multiple platforms, write articles on the fly, as well as perform functions like those you can do on admin page. And because it is a desktop client, you don’t wait for pages to load.

Taken from HONGKIAT.COM – Desktop Blogging Clients, The Ultimate List.

However, there appeared to be an issue with all clients for WordPress and the system we have running on IND-Web.com due to our servers being fire-walled in such a way as to block loopback calls where an application that the user calls on our servers tries to connect back to the same server.

We consider it bad coding practice by WordPress to get a page from itself on the server using loopback but understand that this can be needed by people who do not have needed functions like wp-cron.

This loopback problem has not only effected XML-RPC but two other issues that were fixed in the past for our servers (wp-cron and pingbacks) so Daniel Llewellyn created a Ticket on our development servers and got to work fixing the problem without modifying the WordPress MU base code.

If wpmu can filter the xmlrpc call to it’s own function which then initiates a loopback call, why can’t I do the same to circumvent the wpmu call and create my own function that does the same job without the loopback?

Taken from Honeymonster’s Lair – First post using xmlrpc: “how I fixed a bug..”.

Now our users are free to use blogging clients on their desktops and mobile devices – blogging while offline or on the move has never been easier – Thank you to our team member ‘Daniel’ for working late to fix this issue.