WordPress and AS3, a few notes

UPDATE: My WordPress AS3 API is now available.

I’m about halfway through developing my WordPress / AS3 library and I thought I’d note down a few things that have come up during development.

Does anyone know their blogId?

The blogId parameter is required for most wp, mt, and metaweblog calls, yet there is no easy way for a user to find this out (you can’t get your blogId from the WordPress admin interface) – it seems the only way is through a call to wp.getUsersBlogs, using the data from the returned array to match up with the blog url that you are calling. I’ve simplified this process in my API so that whenever you make a webservice method call the api will check to see if a valid blogId is available, and if not, make the wp.getUsersBlogs call for you first.

Inconstencies

WordPress XML-RPC is inconsistent in the way it sends and retrieves some types of data. For example, categories are retrieved using wp.getCategories with the properties categoryName and categoryId, but if you use wp.suggestCategories you get category_name and category_id instead, meaning I have had to write duplicate parsing functions on a few occasions.

Null values

Ak33m’s XML-RPC library (correctly, I assume) serializes null properties to strings with a value of "null". This means  that when you send data to WordPress you can end up with “null” showing up everywhere – (A post with a category of “null” and a tag of “null”, a category with a slug of “null” etc). To avoid this I’ve had to create an IXMLRPC implementation for all of my WordPress structs that converts “null" to an empty string ("") before serialization.

Multiple authors

I haven’t worked out how to make metaweblog.getRecentPosts work with multiple authors. Because you have to authenticate using a username/password to make the call, you can only seem to retrieve posts by that particular author. I’m not sure how to get posts from multi-author blog without having to authenticate separately for each user, which is quite frustrating.

Apart from these minor issues, everything is going along smoothly though – I now have all post, category and page functions working correctly, options and comments to follow.