XML-RPC: A powerful tool for remote procedure calls in WordPress

Core points:

• XML-RPC is a remote procedure call protocol that uses XML to represent data and is called over HTTP. It allows developers to remotely execute WordPress core functions, thus building tools that can perform various actions on WordPress installations.
• WordPress reveals a large number of core functions through XML-RPC, which are divided into nine categories: articles, taxonomy, media, comments, options, users, categories, tags, and pages. These features can be used to perform actions such as searching articles or authors, creating new articles, and managing comments or users.
• Although XML-RPC provides a convenient way to remotely manage WordPress websites, it was once the target of hackers in the past. WordPress has taken steps to protect XML-RPC, such as limiting the number of login attempts through XML-RPC. It is recommended to use plugins that can further protect XML-RPC or disable it when not in use.

XML-RPC is a remote procedure call (a function of a process calling another process through a remote connection) protocol that uses XML to represent data and uses HTTP to call. While applications can explicitly provide their own REST API for RPCs, standard protocols help improve security and offer many other benefits. For example, developers do not have to design a REST API architecture from scratch, and a single client can be used to make remote procedure calls to various server applications that support standard protocols. Therefore, XML-RPC is introduced as a standard protocol for RPC.

This tutorial will introduce different WordPress core features that can be executed remotely using XML-RPC. This can help us build tools that can perform various actions on WordPress installations. The WordPress mobile app is a great example.

WordPress XML-RPC function

WordPress exposes many core features through XML-RPC. All public XML-RPC functions are divided into 9 categories: articles, taxonomy, media, comments, options, users, categories, tags, and pages.

Function list:

All functions are listed below:

Article function (available from WordPress 3.4):

<code>wp.getPost
wp.getPosts
wp.newPost
wp.editPost
wp.deletePost
wp.getPostType
wp.getPostTypes
wp.getPostFormats
wp.getPostStatusList</code>

Taxonomy Function (available from WordPress 3.4):

<code>wp.getTaxonomy
wp.getTaxonomies
wp.getTerm
wp.getTerms
wp.newTerm
wp.editTerm
wp.deleteTerm</code>

Media Functions (available from WordPress 3.1):

<code>wp.getMediaItem
wp.getMediaLibrary
wp.uploadFile</code>

Comment function (available from WordPress 2.7):

<code>wp.getCommentCount
wp.getComment
wp.getComments
wp.newComment
wp.editComment
wp.deleteComment
wp.getCommentStatusList</code>

Option function (available from WordPress 2.6):

<code>wp.getOptions
wp.setOptions</code>

User Functions (available from WordPress 3.5):

<code>wp.getUsersBlogs
wp.getUser
wp.getUsers
wp.getProfile
wp.editProfile
wp.getAuthors</code>

Classification Functions (available from WordPress 3.4):

<code>wp.getCategories
wp.suggestCategories
wp.newCategory
wp.deleteCategory</code>

Tag function (available from WordPress 3.4):

<code>wp.getTags</code>

Page functions (available from WordPress 3.4):

<code>wp.getPage
wp.getPages
wp.getPageList
wp.newPage
wp.editPage
wp.deletePage
wp.getPageStatusList
wp.getPageTemplates</code>

All category names and function names, as well as their uses and purposes, are quite intuitive and easy to understand. Let's look at some examples of the above functions:

Get the list of WordPress authors

The following is the code to use PHP to get a list of all authors for remote WordPress installations:

<code>wp.getPost
wp.getPosts
wp.newPost
wp.editPost
wp.deletePost
wp.getPostType
wp.getPostTypes
wp.getPostFormats
wp.getPostStatusList</code>

Let's see how the above code works:

• First of all, we include the PHPXMLRPC library.
• Then, we create a variable $function_name to save the function name.
• We created another variable that points to the xmlrpc.php file that the WordPress installed. This file always exists in the root directory of WordPress.
• Then we create an XML-RPC client object and pass the URL to the constructor.
• We then instruct the library to convert the response data into PHP array variables for easy reading and processing of response data. It can be difficult to process raw XML response data because we have to parse XML.
• Then, we use the parameters of the wp.getAuthors function to construct a request message object. The first parameter is the blog ID, and the other two parameters are the administrator's username and password.
• Next, we send an XML-RPC request.
• Finally, we get a response. If there is an error, we will display an error, otherwise we will loop over the value properties of the response object to print the author's basic information.

Create an article

We just saw how easy it is to retrieve a list of authors. Here is how to create an article:

<code>wp.getTaxonomy
wp.getTaxonomies
wp.getTerm
wp.getTerms
wp.newTerm
wp.editTerm
wp.deleteTerm</code>

Here, we call the function wp.newPost. In addition to the blog ID, username and password, we also pass a structure type that contains the article type, status, title, content, author, and summary.

Note: Detect XML-RPC requests

Quick Tip: If you are a plugin or theme developer, you may want your code to perform different actions on XML-RPC requests. WordPress allows themes and plugins to detect if WordPress is processing XML-RPC requests. The following is the code to detect XML-RPC requests:

<code>wp.getMediaItem
wp.getMediaLibrary
wp.uploadFile</code>

Conclusion

In this article, we introduce the basics of WordPress XML-RPC, including the basics of XML-RPC and how WordPress exposes this protocol. We also demonstrate how to perform various actions on a WordPress installation using XML-RPC. You can now create mobile, desktop, or web application XML-RPC clients for WordPress.

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