Argh.
Ok, so i know Wordpress is not necessarily bug free, but I really wish its XMLRPC was a little more robust.
Last time I installed it [version 1.2.2] I had a few problems with it, but at least there was a reason to expect such problems: that release did not officially support XMLRPC [I think the file was accidentally left out of the package], and to enable it I had to dig up an older, buggy copy from the CVS repository.
To my surprise I have found that this time around [version 1.5] I have found some similar problems, as well as a brand new one to do with parsing the XML data. The following XMLRPC parameters cause a failed login now [up until this install this has worked fine]:
It seems to fail not because there is anything wrong with the data, but because of the whitespace between the param elements, which as far as I can see should be utterly harmless. Authentication fails because somehow those line-ends get attached to the username and passwords during parsing. Having removed them [and made the data less human readable] the problem seems to have gone away. Such fragility seems very un-XML.
Another minor problem [which may be a result of me reading Dave Winer’s metaWeblog spec wrong [not hard to do, there’s a lot of filling in the blanks]] is with passing datetime info with entries; it seems to not work at all, actually causing a PHP error.
The line: "$dateCreated = $dateCreatedd->getIso();" in xmlrpc.php results in "bad member function" error, seemingly because $dateCreatedd is just a string and doesn’t have such a specific member?