The project has now been moved to GitHub:
http://www.github.com/alexjamesbrown/joeblogs

I will eventually move the Wiki / Docs to the page also.

If anyone would like to become a contributor, please contact me on GitHub

Some very brief details below, and a cry for help (or several cries!)

New Features / Improvements

Friendlier API
Instead of having to deal with the XML-RPC interfaces directly, I’ve added a “friendly” layer of classes on top.
The WordPressWrapper class has helper methods, with friendly properties, for doing things like uploading files etc…

• More examples
  The sample project (console application) included in the project demonstrates all methods and features of the library.
• Better documentation
  XML RPC Comments on all the public properties and methods

Help required

I need help with some of the following, both for this version, and subsequent versions

• PHP WordPress Re-install script
  Script (configured as CRON job) to “refresh” test install of WordPress (every couple of hours or something)
• Unit Tests
  Need better code coverage., and more integration tests
  I’m not TDD expert, so unfortunately, a lot of this will be retro-fitting unit tests into the current code.
• WordPress Plugin development
  I plan to release an “extended” version of XML RPC – with some enhanced methods in, for use with JoeBlogs – for example “GetRecentPosts”
• ASP.Net Demo Project
  Eventually, and ASP.net MVC “blog” project, running from WordPress – for no other reason than “it can be done”
• Moving project to GitHub
  See below
• General code improvement
  Refactoring, performance enhancements, etc…
• Logo Designed
  ‘cos every cool open source project has to have a cool logo, right?
• Website
  I’ve dipped my hand into my pocket, and bought joeblogswrapper.org (under £7 – GoDaddy)
  Will have a site dedicated to it on there soon. Obvious CMS choice would be WordPress, but if anyone can think of a better option for Wiki style pages, I’m all ears
  (Media wiki..? What are the benefits?)

Mailing List

I’ve created a Google Group – http://groups.google.com/group/joeblogs/
Please, sign up on there for announcements (I’ll announce when the next versions of the wrapper are available)

GitHub

I really like the idea of moving this project over to GitHub.

Problem is, I have absolutely no experience using Git.

I’ve tried following the instructions, and got as far as some files imported into my repository.. but I can’t get it to work, or commit my changes.

If anyone would like to offer their hand-holding expertise on getting this moved over (and training me on committing files etc…) then I’ll gladly move it to GitHub, which long term, I believe could be beneficial to the overall development of the project.

Get in touch

If you’d like to help with ANY of the above (or anything I’ve missed for that matter) please get in touch, or use the Google Group

First, you need to create an instance of Post.

Then, set the following properties:

dateCreated
Fairly self explanatory, but you should set this to today’s date (or whatever date you wish the post to be set as published)

title
The title of the post

description
The body of the post.
This can of course contain HTML

categories
This is a string array of categories to associate with the post

mt_keywords
Another string array, representing the tags for the post

Then, using your presumably already instantiated Wrapper class, you can call the NewPost method, which takes the above Post object as a parameter, and a boolean – indicating if the post is to be set as published. Note – if this is set to false, the post is set in draft mode.

Here’s some sample code:

//create a new post
var post = new Post();

//since this is a struct, we can't have a constructor that does this!
post.dateCreated=DateTime.Now;
post.title="This is a title";
post.description="this is the body of the post. it <strong>could</strong> be html.";

//create the post!
wp.NewPost(post,true);

Hope this helps!

It seems that I had a typo in my comments in JoeBlogs.TestHarness/Program.cs on line 15:

//typically http://www.yourdomain.com/xmlprc.php (if your wordpress blog is installed in root dir)

The problem, is the xmlprc.php – this should be xmlrpc.php.

Those of you that copy pasted / uncommented out that line, would be executing requests against a file that didn’t exist on your server!

I’ve changed this typo, and committed to Codeplex: revision #27138

Thanks to Felix for pointing this out!

Download the latest release of JoeBlogs from Codeplex
(Click the Downloads tab, and select the latest download)

Step 2

Unzip the contents of the downloaded zip file.
(I usually copy DLLs I am going to use into a “lib” folder at the root of my solution)

Step 3

Add a reference to BOTH CookComputing.XmlRpcV2.dll AND JoeBlogs.dll

Include AlexJamesBrown.JoeBlogs in your class, with using / Imports:

C#

using AlexJamesBrown.JoeBlogs;

VB

Imports AlexJamesBrown.JoeBlogs

Step 4:

Instantiate a new Wrapper object.

So far, the available wrappers are:

MetaWeblogWrapper

WordPressWrapper

C#

WordPressWrapper wrapper = new WordPressWrapper(Url, Username, Password);

VB

Dim wrapper As New WordPressWrapper(Url, Username, Password)

Please note -

The above example has the Url, Username and Password strings omitted. Simply replace them with the relevant information.

Step 5

You can now take full advantage of all the methods on your instantiated wrapper.

C#

string Url = "www.alexjamesbrown.com";
string User = "MyUser"; //enter your username
string Password = "MyPassword"; //enter your password

var wp = new WordPressWrapper(Url, User, Password);

//a few test functions...
var userBlogs = wp.GetUserBlogs();
var tags = wp.GetTags();
var categories = wp.GetCategories();

var authors = wp.GetAuthors();

To enable me to create JoeBlogs, I made use of the IXmlRpcProxy Proxy classes…

I created my interface, implementing IXmlRpcProxy:

We define the method as an XML RPC method using XmlRpcMethod.
The name of the method is also specified.
In this case, we are using getPost from the metaWeblog XML RPC API – WordPress supports this, as well as the Blogger API and the Movable Type API.
They also have their own (which is an extension to the Moveable Type API) –

http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp

Anyway…..

As per the metaWeblog.getPost specification, we need to pass in the postid, username, and password. So we create our interface as follows:

	public interface IMyProxy: IXmlRpcProxy
	{
		[XmlRpcMethod("metaWeblog.getPost")]
		Post GetPost(string postid, string username, string password);
  	}

As we can see, this returns a “Post”

This is a struct, that basically defines the structure of the response.

	[XmlRpcMissingMapping(MappingAction.Ignore)]
	public struct Post
	{
		public DateTime dateCreated;
		public string description;
		public string title;
		public string postid;
		public string[] categories;

		public override string ToString()
		{
			return this.description;
		}
	}

To use this,  you need to create an instance of the proxy object.

XML RPC.net provides a method called XmlRpcProxyGen to do this for us.

We then set the Url, which is declared as part of IXmlRpcProxy (remember IMyProxy implemented this interface…)

Since our proxy declared the method GetPost, we can now use this, pass in the required post id, username and password.

    public void myTest()
    {
      string postId = "1234";
      string username = "myUsername";
      string password = "password";

      var proxy = (IMyProxy)XmlRpcProxyGen.Create(typeof(IMyProxy));
      proxy.Url = "www.alexjamesbrown.com";

      var post = proxy.GetPost(postId, username, password);
    }

And there we have it.

Of course this is a very bare bones example.

JoeBlogs contains much more separation of these concerns.

A little open source project I’m working on – Joe Blogs.

In a nutshell, it allows easy communication to your WordPress (or other blog) via an xml-rpc interface.

Big thanks to the work by Charles Cook at http://www.xml-rpc.net/

Joe Blogs is currently hosted on CodePlex – http://joeblogs.codeplex.com/

I’ll be posting more info, tutorials, documentation etc… in the coming days and weeks.

Update

See here for usage instructions:
http://www.alexjamesbrown.com/geek/using-joeblogs/