How to set Word up as WordPress editor ?

Make a document and pick from the File menu “Save and Send”, and you get an extra option to publish as blog post.

Once you pick that it opens an editor for blog posts, that pn the background uses the XML-RPC interface. Word starts a wizard the first time, that you can also access by “manage accounts” in the editor menu :

But let’s start by clicking Save and Send : Word will ask you to register an account, iow your wordpress blog website.

When registering you can pick from a whole list of blog types, of course I picked WordPress

In the dialog ‘new wordpress account’ you enter your XML-RPC end point, the directory of your blog with /xmlrpc.php, that is where you can post to your blog. Username and Password can be your normal username and password, you can also register separately at the blog. That would be my choice.

Of course these days blog posts all have pictures, and in the account dialog in the lower left corner there is a button “picture options” where you can specify how you want uploaded. You can use an FTP upload but in my case picking the blog provider (iow let WordPress handle it itself) works out of the box.

Once you click OK you also get a warning about the visibility of your login and password, XML-RPC posts are text files and your account user name and password are not encrypted when sent to the blog XML-RPC endpoint. There is little risk in it but it is a point that has to be made.

When you agree to continue you can edit your post. And when done, publish.

…and out came this post. In the WordPress editor you can add some tags and categories if you publish as draft, but you can also specify a category in the  Word editor..

Word offers a lot of picture effects yet it outputs the result as  .png images so it works without css3 dependencies, and outputs very clean html markup. Just for the picture effects and total ease of editing it gets a 5 out of 5.

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 always used MsAccess for RAD blueprinting and I reckon you can build a better more flexible interface in 20 hours. With XHR MsAccess has some better internet capabilities these days, a nice simple XMLHttp library.

You can use it for any http rest api in the cloud.

Ajax for Access :) here’s the most basic wordpress xml-rpc call, sayHello.

For pre-Vista you need the MSXML 6.0 library from microsoft, in Vista I already had it installed so you can add a reference to the library and off you go.