Remote Publish To WordPress As Draft Using XML-RPC

5 October 2009 Comments

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Over the weekend I was looking for a way to auto post from my Posterous powered dotkeith.com blog to my WordPress powered blog here at SmartestGeek.com using the XML-RPC protocol and save the new post as a draft for further editing. Surprisingly I was unable to find a plugin to allow this but with a little research I was able to figure out a simple solution and thought I would post about it here for anybody else having trouble with this.

Since the release of WordPress 2.6 remote publishing has been disabled by default so you will need to enable it by going to settings > writing in your WordPress admin panel. Though there are currently no known issues with this feature there have been security risks in the past.

How to remote publish to WordPress and save as a draft

1. Open the xmlrpc.php located in your WordPress blog’s root directory using a text editor.

2. Search for this string: $post_status = $publish ? ‘publish’ : ‘draft’; and replace the five instances of this with $post_status = $publish ? ‘draft’ : ‘publish’;

That’s it your done! Just save the file and upload it back to your WordPress root directory.

Lee Newton

I'm unfamiliar with Posterous, but if it's calling metaWeblog.newPost on the xmlrpc side you don't need to hack your xmlrpc to get the behaviour you're looking for. The last argument newPost takes is $publish. False = draft, true = publish and is what you're bass ackwarding when you flip those if statements. Unnecessary core hacks always feel icky :)