• get all user id’s
• a get id’s for test.start between table.start and table.end
• b get id’s for test.end between table.start and table.end
• c get id’s for test.start < table.start and test.end > table.end
• merge the three overlapping sets (a b c)
• available = the difference between all id’s and the merged set

It works but it takes four queries on the entire table.

Isn’t there a more intelligent way of doing that ?

To get that done, I make a new plugin that adds a new method to the xml-rpc server.

The method ‘p2p.welcome’ is mapped to the plugin function ‘p2p_welcome’, which returns the “about yourself” description of the admin profile.

I plug that into the wordpress blog.

Then I can make a small test program :

• include class-IXR.php which has the IXR_Client class
• extend IXR_Client as P2PClient
• add a function P2PClient->whoareyou()
• …that calls the new method p2p.whoami on the blog
• echo the returned data : the admin profile description

That returns :

Hi I am juust, admin of loaneys.com. I worked as business economist at project control and proces automation in engineering and utilities. These days, I do some scripting as a hobby and stick to painting as job.

That is a basic way to exchange blog data by extending the xml-rpc endpoint.

It works, to a point. You can take a Word document, run the PostToWordpress macro (with your own blogs settings) and it puts the content in Wordpress.

I haven’t worked with Word for a few years, you’d have to ask someone with up-to-date Word vba skills how to grab the document title, and sanitize and format the document text into proper html-output. For the tests I grabbed a snippet off the net, it does not do a perfect job but the basic idea is kosher.

metaWeblog.newPost

Most sites (including blogger) have skipped from blogger.newPost to newer formats. I prefer using the metaWeblog.newPost rpc method, it is a bit more versatile, and supported by Wordpress as well.

(ref. msdn library article on metaWeblog.newPost)

The methodcall is structured like this :

• methodname : metaWeblog.newPost
• blogid
• blog user name
• blog password
• the post struct with it’s members
  • categories array
  • description (the doc text)
  • title
  • date created
• publish (0=save as draft, 1=publish immediately)

So let’s build that step by step as vba routine :

Once I have the blog settings and the content + attributes for the new Wordpress post, I set up the XMLHttpRequest object :

Then I start building the XML to send to Wordpress,

conversion to html

The main practical problem is converting the Word document content to html. I grabbed two quick functions to select the current document text, convert the most common html entities and replace linebreaks with their html counterparts, but it is far from perfect.

The Wordpress Incutio xml-parser will not pass content it cannot make sense of, which leaves you with an empty post.

using CDATA

A rather common hack I used above is using < ![CDATA[ ]]> to wrap the post content, which indicates to the wordpress xml-parser that I pass a string of raw character data as content. The parser ignores it, and Wordpress stuffs everything in the database.

Works great, but it can backfire and slip stuff in the database that wordpress cannot handle and display correctly.

I’d test without using CDATA if you want to post from Word on a regular basis, or use a more professional html-converter on the word documents first.

I used a similar technique ten years ago, setting up msaccess as reporting tool for SAP R/3 with RFC dll’s and ActiveX. That remained stable for eight years without maintenance. Hey, I might get lucky with Wordpress xml-rpc and xhr/ajax.

I called the example RpSequel.

adding sql rpc functions

To sync the data sets, I will duplicate a list with sequel operations from my desktop database as rfc call to my blog’s xmlrpc-endpoint. To handle that list, I plug a sql crud method into the xml-rpc method array in Wordpress :

The basic INSERT method itself can be simple:

That in itself is not very exciting, it stuffs records in the host’s database. Which is fine, however, I want the blog to respond to individual operations.

I can write rpc-functions for every single function I want the blog to perform, that means truckloads of rpc-functions, on both client and server end. I am incredibly lazy, so I ain’t gonna go there.

adding hooks to sql rpc functions

Lucky for me, Wordpress has hooks, hooks are cool.

Adding action hooks (before_insert and after_insert) to the crud method makes it more powerful. Two hooks are enough to separate the business logic of the desktop database from the blogs reporting logic.

Now it is more exciting.

• I can send a list of records and a rfc insert-method to the blogs xmlrpc endpoint
• the rfc crud-plugin can process the records one by one
• Before and after each insert operation, the method triggers an action.
• Before inserting, it exposes the record data.
• After inserting, it exposes the record id.

And the last two, was exactly what I wanted.

adding functionality with plugins

Now I can add tiny plugins, that ‘listen’ on the action hooks in the rfc-methods. If there is an INSERT into the database, my plugins read which table it affects. They can perform actions, either before the insert, with the new record data, or after the insert, with the new record id.

That’s basically all it takes. As technique, it has it’s limitations, but it can come in handy sometimes.

Yesterday I made some basic stuff to grab my Wordpress blog data with visual basic for applicationsn cos I don’t feel like programming php admin pages for tables.

So let’s make a basic xml-rpc crud plugin and put my agenda on vba remote control.

The basic xml-rpc plugin is simple, plug extra methods into the xml-rpc method array, and write a function per crud-method.

There now, if I call on the xmlrpc.php file, the extra methods are added to the callback array and I can use the table CRUD functions from my vba desktop.

note : the agendaitem is a struct in an array (see below), I use [0] to get the first struct (which is the actual array with field-value pairs, my record with agenda info).

Activate the plugin, and write a simple test

Et voila :

That’s yer basic Office-Wordpress XML-RPC integration.

I make a table in access (id, isAdmin, blogid, url, blogName, xmlrpc) and then query wordpress, parse the xml response in store it in the database.

So here we go query Wordpress :

that’s pretty straight forward.

I get an xml message back with the data stored in an array of STRUCT types.

The other worpdress api calls work quite the same.

I actually want the crawlers to come around, so I will make an array with bots and allowed_bots. Whatever is not on the white-list gets a meager page with overhead jobs attached to it, the rest (iow visitors and the big search engines) get the standard page.

There are truckloads of bots (see crawltrack), for my purposes a few regulars will do.

In templates and functions i can use some simple code to run stuff conditional :

It would be nice if Wordpress built in a switch to run plugins conditional.

one related smart plugin is the chennai central plugin that sends 304 not modified headers on conditional GETs, so crawlers don’t fetch the page. That can save some bandwidth and serverload.