Continuous Learning

Overview

This series of articles is about Wordpress API - how to interface with Wordpress to create posts and manage posts without having to dig into its internal data structures. I have chance to take a look at WP’s internal, and it is certainly not for the faint of heart (or the lack of time), and external API are definitely more stable in the name of upgrades and changes.

It turns out that Wordpress DOES have an external API:

WordPress uses an XML-RPC interface. We currently support the Blogger API, metaWeblog API, and the Movable Type API .

…

You can always develop your own. Many scripts in Perl, Python, PHP, Applescript and Java have already been written and are ripe for the picking (and tweaking).

Reason

The challenge is, the document isn’t much longer than the quoted text above. If you already know these API it might be easy to know for you what’s going on. But for someone who hasn’t been paying attention to the API and need a primer, this document is not sufficient.

Furthermore, out of the three API links, one is no longer linking to the original document, and another is a broken link. That doesn’t really help.

This is why I am writing this primer. The primer documents what I found and learned, and hopefully it will help others who need to learn about WP API so they don’t have to go through the same exercise

Format & Style

Because there are actually some authoritative sources out there, the goal for this primer isn’t to duplicate those documents, but rather to provide one point of reference and additional supplement information. Therefore, you need to go to those sources to fully understand the context.

Below is the TOC. As I publish each article I will activate the link here:

• XMLRPC - the foundation of WP API
• Blogger API - first of the three WP API
• MetaWeblog - second of the three WP API
• MovableType API - last of the three WP API
• xmlrpc.php - What Wordpress actually implements

Please stay tuned.