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Can I create a generic login (Is there a generic login) to use with XML-RPC?

  1. limefrogyank
    Member

    I'm making a client app that will display a wordpress blog (outside of the browser) and show comments, TOC, etc. I would like to be able to use XML-RPC to get all the information rather than scrape it from the HTML. From what I can tell, the XML-RPC interface requires a wordpress login even to retrieve information.

    Is there a public username/password that can be used just to retreive information and be locked out of making any changes?

    If not, can I create a user account with the sole purpose of retreiving information from blogs via XML-RPC? I intend to make the user login with their own information if they wanted to post comments, but I would like to avoid forcing them to sign up for wordpress just to read the blog through my app. I would use SSL to encrypt the info and the "public" login information would never be revealed to the user of the app.

    Thanks
    Blog url: http://wp7wordpressapp.wordpress.com/

  2. andrewspittle
    Happiness Engineer

    XML-RPC actually requires user authentication in order to access any site content. So to access the content of a blog you would need the owner of the site to authenticate the connection.

    If you're making a client app to show content I would recommend using the RSS and Atom feeds that each site includes by default. That will let you pull content without requiring user authentication from each site owner.

  3. limefrogyank
    Member

    So let me get this straight... if a user of the app uses his own credentials to try and download a post via XML-RPC (like using metaWeblog.getPost), it won't work unless he is the owner of the site? In that case, wp.newComment wouldn't work, either?

    If true, then XML-RPC is really only useful for a blog editing app, where you have the owner's credentials?

  4. macmanx
    Happiness Engineer

    Yes, that is pretty much what XML-RPC was designed for.

    If you allowed anyone to access XML-RPC, then everyone would be able to post to your blog too.

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