Problems with setting XML-RPC date using metWeblog.newPost()

[Da_fonz]

Had problems setting a date with newPost and came across this which seemed to fix things. Should this be included as a patch or is there something that we're all missing here?

​http://www.franzone.com/2007/07/30/wordpress-xml-rpc-patch-for-metweblog-newpost-method/

I'm amazed that we haven't had blog clients complaining about this. I've put together a patch to address metaWeblog.newPost and metaWeblog.editPost. Date/time is a very sensitive issue with the current blog APIs, so I'm requesting additional feedback from the wp-xmlrpc email list as well.

It finally dawned on me what is probably happening here. Instead of sending dateCreated as a dateTime.iso8601, he was probably using the string type.

I've heard back from some of the other blog clients and they haven't had a problem using dateCreated, so I'm closing this as invalid. If further details come up that conclude there is indeed a problem we can always re-open this ticket.

Reading dateCreated works fine, but you can't set it.

The getIso() method (part of IXR_Date) is being called on a string in 5 different places.

Replying to t0mmmmmmm:

Reading dateCreated works fine, but you can't set it.

The getIso() method (part of IXR_Date) is being called on a string in 5 different places.

Please provide an example of a failing request so we can reproduce your issue.

Closing this ticket. If the problem turns out to be real and can be reproduced then we'll reopen it.

This is tested and is definitely an issue, and I therefore request that the ticket is re-opened.

When enabling error reporting, the following error occurs when using the "metaWeblog.newPost" function:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function getIso() on a non-object in /var/www/xmlrpc.php on line 2187

To verify, create the following test file in the same directory as xmlrpc.php:

<?php

  include_once('wp-includes/class-IXR.php');

  $url = 'http://www.yourdomain.com/xmlrpc.php';
  $user = 'admin';
  $pass = 'password';

  $client = new IXR_Client($url);

  $client->query('metaWeblog.newPost', 1, $user, $pass,
                 array('post_status' => 'draft',
                       'title' => 'Date Set Test Post',
                       'description' => 'Test Post',
                       'dateCreated' => '20090815T10:00:00Z', 1);

  $res = $client->getResponse();

  if ($res) {
    print "Post #$res added successfully<br>\n";
  } else {
    print "Post not added<br>\n";
  }

?>

Obviously change the $url, $user and $pass to your server details.

With an unpatched xmlrpc.php, the above will fail and return "Post not added".

The problem is the following code:

$dateCreated = $content_struct['dateCreated']->getIso();

$content_struct['dateCreated'] is a string, yet an object method is applied.

To fix, simply remove all occurrences of "->getIso()" from xmlrpc.php. When done, the above test code will return "Post #xxx added successfully"

One more issue: in the same section you will find use of the constant GMT:

$post_date_gmt = iso8601_to_datetime($dateCreated, GMT);

However, it is not defined anywhere as a constant and PHP does an implicit conversion. This should be amended to use a string constant instead:

$post_date_gmt = iso8601_to_datetime($dateCreated, 'GMT');

The enclosed patch corrects xmlrpc.php for both these issues.

Note: The same problem exists in wp_editComment and mw_editPost and have been corrected in the patch, but I have not tested these.

I have also reported this on my site at ​http://www.effectivemarketingtenerife.com/technical/wordpress-xmlrpc-datecreated-bug-not-fixed/

Patch to correct erroneous ->getIso() call.

Your request is incorrectly encoding the date as a <string></string> not an <dateTime.iso8601></dateTime.iso8601> as it should be.

If you encode your request correctly then it will work.

Replying to westi:

Your request is incorrectly encoding the date as a <string></string> not an <dateTime.iso8601></dateTime.iso8601> as it should be.

If you encode your request correctly then it will work.

Hi,

Ok, understood.

The corrected code THAT WILL WORK is as follows:

<?php
  include_once('wp-includes/class-IXR.php');

  $url = 'http://www.yourdomain.com/xmlrpc.php';
  $user = 'admin';
  $pass = 'password';

  $client = new IXR_Client($url);

  $date = new IXR_Date('20090815T10:00:00');
  $client->query('metaWeblog.newPost', 1, $user, $pass,
                 array('post_status' => 'draft',
                       'title' => 'Date Set Test Post',
                       'description' => 'Test Post',
                       'dateCreated' => $date), 1);

  $res = $client->getResponse();

  if ($res) {
    print "Post #$res added successfully<br>\n";
  } else {
    print "Post not added<br>\n";
  }

?>

My apologies - however the confusion arises from the Codex (​http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp) which isn't very clear.

The codex states (for instance for wp.newPage) that the format for the dateCreate parameter is:

datetime dateCreate

So when reading this there wasn't sufficient information to understand the datetime itself had to be encapsulated in <dateTime.iso8601></dateTime.iso8601> before it would work.

Also, there is very little documentation about the IXR_Client library which makes it a bit more difficult to find the relevant information. I guess I would have reached the correct conclusion earlier if I had built the XML file from scratch rather than using the IXR_Client class.

Ticket can be closed; the above code works perfectly.

The IXR library came from - ​http://scripts.incutio.com/xmlrpc/ - which has details on how to use it. The XML-RPC spec is also a helpful read - ​http://www.xmlrpc.com/spec - it's fairly short and to the point. The spec describes the XML markup for each data type.