“RE: MetaWeblog.getRecentPosts: Conflict and Confusion”

On 9/15/04, Brent Simmons said:

>My advice: implement to the spec, and also implement
>mt.getCategoryList. (I note that you've already done
>mt.getCategoryList.)
>
>http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mtmanual_programmatic.html

The problem is that some other people actually seem to have written their own spec. xoops and wordpress both expect an array, for example.

(I think it's due to a bug in the xmlrpc.net library by cooke software.)

For now, I'm making the spec the default behavior. It returns a struct. I've also written in the code to return an array instead, but right now it's never run. If I decide later that there's a good reason to support it, I can add a preference to control it. (Yuck.)

>Here's why:
>
>1. Any client that doesn't handle metaWeblog.getCategories
>according to the spec already doesn't work with Radio and Manila
>(and possibly others). The client has a bug that should be fixed
>-- but it's not your bug.

Right, that's where the purist in me cheers. Unfortunately, the purist in me isn't the one being paid to solve a problem.

>2. For many clients, if you tell them it's an MT-compatible site,
>they'll use mt.getCategoryList instead of metaWeblog.getCategories
>anyway. So the metaWeblog.getCategories method isn't necessarily
>all that important. (NetNewsWire 2.0's weblog editor, for
>instance, calls mt.getCategoryList for Conversant sites.)

It really bugs me that the mt-api doesn't have a link field!!! Argh! That's a big part of why this issue is so sticky for me: one of my clients is paying me to get this all worked out in Conversant. The mt api is clearly the best, but it doesn't have a link field and they need it. If they use the MetaWeblog api instead, they're limited on the clients they can use because of the array/struct issue with categories.

(On the other hand, some of the editors don't support link fields, either. Ecto on Windows, for example.)

I was going to say that at least one editor also appears to be double-entifying the content fields (title, description, mt_excerpt), but this turns out to be a bug in Frontier which I can work around. (When it "compiles" xml, it de-entifies &lt; to < and &gt; to >, but doesn't do anything to &quot;. Go figure.)

Want to port NNW 2.0 (or at least the editor) to Windows? ;-)

Seth