weblogUpdates.extendedPing does not implement standard

[Scott Schram]

When a blog post is published or updated, Update Services are notified if they are listed in the Wordpress Writing Settings panel.

The services are notified by the weblog_ping() function in comment.php

That function first attempts an XMLRPC call to the service's weblogUpdates.extendedPing. If that fails, it attempts to notify weblogUpdates.ping.

if ( !$client->query('weblogUpdates.extendedPing', get_option('blogname'), $home, get_bloginfo('rss2_url') ) ) // then try a normal ping
	$client->query('weblogUpdates.ping', get_option('blogname'), $home);

1) The weblogUpdates.extendedPing does not match the published standard.

See:

​http://www.google.com/help/blogsearch/pinging_API.html

Where 5 parameters are specified:

• Name of site
• URL of site
• URL of the page to be checked for changes
• URL of RSS, RDF, or Atom feed
• Optional a name (or "tag") categorizing your site content. You may delimit multiple values by using the '|' character.

The third parameter should be the page to be checked for changes, and not the RSS feed.

No 4th or 5th parameter is passed.

2) The weblogUpdates.extendedPing does not take advantage of notifying the service of the exact page that changed (as is provided in the standard)

If implemented correctly, this would allow the receiving service (perhaps a search engine) to come directly to the correct page for re-indexing, instead of trying to figure it out from the RSS feed.

I am unable to find if pingomatic.com publishes a competing version of the standard.

[Scott Schram]

Notifying the receiving service of the changedURL would allow (for example) a service that sends SMS or email messages to interested parties about which pages that have been changed on their site.

[shaunmza]

Added missing parameter

[dd32]

The original page mentioned in the ticket no longer exists, however ​http://www.weblogs.com/api.html and ​https://developer.twingly.com/resources/rpc-ping/ agree's with the original ticket, while ​http://blo.gs/ping-example.php & others disagree's (and agrees with core).

It'd be really nice if I could find a extendedPing spec that isn't hosted itself by a weblogupdates provider.. or at least one that the others referred to.

It seems that WordPress has simply always done this wrong, not sure for what reason, for reference r2572 was when the current code was added.
It also seems commonly accepted that most servers simply ignore the extra parameters, or handle a RSS feed perfectly okay, which also makes sense as the RSS feed should have updated at the same time as the post/page itself.