metaWeblog.newPost posting to WordPress from Word

Quick and dirty : posting to WordPress from Word with VBA. I put the text source on the server.

It works, to a point. You can take a Word document, run the PostToWordpress macro (with your own blogs settings) and it puts the content in WordPress.

I haven’t worked with Word for a few years, you’d have to ask someone with up-to-date Word vba skills how to grab the document title, and sanitize and format the document text into proper html-output. For the tests I grabbed a snippet off the net, it does not do a perfect job but the basic idea is kosher.

metaWeblog.newPost

Most sites (including blogger) have skipped from blogger.newPost to newer formats. I prefer using the metaWeblog.newPost rpc method, it is a bit more versatile, and supported by WordPress as well.

(ref. msdn library article on metaWeblog.newPost)

The methodcall is structured like this :

• methodname : metaWeblog.newPost
• blogid
• blog user name
• blog password
• the post struct with it’s members
  • categories array
  • description (the doc text)
  • title
  • date created
• publish (0=save as draft, 1=publish immediately)

So let’s build that step by step as vba routine :

Sub PostToWordpress()

'the basic blog settings
    txtURL = "http://www.blog.com/xmlrpc.php"
    txtBlogId = "1"
    txtUserName = "MyUserName"
    txtPassWord = "MyPassword"

'the document settings
    txtTitle = "MyTitle"
    'note : you can use the documents creation date here
    txtDateCreated = Format(Now(), "yyyyMMdd") & "T" & Format(Now(), "hh:mm:ss")
   
    'Categories is an array in the post,
    'you can use category names,
    'and you can always use "Uncategorized" 
    'as all wordpress blogs have it

    Dim MyCategories(2) As String
    MyCategories(1) = "Uncategorized"
    MyCategories(2) = "example_category_one"

    'note: this function grabs the document text, 
    'replaces linebreaks with html linebreaks etc. 

    'it needs a lot more work
    txtDocument = getCurrentDocAsSimpleHtml()

Once I have the blog settings and the content + attributes for the new WordPress post, I set up the XMLHttpRequest object :

      
    Dim objSvrHTTP As ServerXMLHTTP
    Dim strT As String
    Set objSvrHTTP = New ServerXMLHTTP
  
    objSvrHTTP.Open "POST", txtURL, False, CStr(txtUserName), _
    CStr(txtPassWord)
  
    objSvrHTTP.setRequestHeader "Accept", "application/xml"
    objSvrHTTP.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "application/xml"

Then I start building the XML to send to WordPress,

'methodcall    
    strT = strT & ""

'methodname
    strT = strT & "metaWeblog.newPost"

'parameters : blog settings
    strT = strT & ""
    strT = strT & "" & txtBlogId & ""
    strT = strT & "" & txtUserName & ""
    strT = strT & "" & txtPassWord & ""

'parameters : the post structure
    strT = strT & ""
        strT = strT & ""

'parameters : post : category array
            strT = strT & "categories"
                strT = strT & ""
                    strT = strT & ""
                        strT = strT & ""

   For i = 1 To UBound(MyCategories)
                            strT = strT & "" & MyCategories(i) & ""
   Next i
                        strT = strT & ""
                    strT = strT & ""
                strT = strT & ""
            strT = strT & ""

'parameters : post : the content
        strT = strT & "description"
            strT = strT & "< [!CDATA[" & txtDocument & "]]>"
        strT = strT & ""

'parameters : post : title
        strT = strT & "title" & txtTitle & ""

'parameters : post : date created
        strT = strT & "dateCreated" &  txtDateCreated & ""
        strT = strT & ""
    strT = strT & ""

'parameters : post : store as draft (0) or publish immediately (1)
    strT = strT & "0"

'end parameters
    strT = strT & ""

'end methodcall
    strT = strT & ""

'send it to wordpress
    objSvrHTTP.send strT

'send the response to the debug window
    Debug.Print objSvrHTTP.responseText

End Sub

conversion to html

The main practical problem is converting the Word document content to html. I grabbed two quick functions to select the current document text, convert the most common html entities and replace linebreaks with their html counterparts, but it is far from perfect.

Private Function getCurrentDocAsSimpleHtml() As String
'... see source text
End Function

' simple HTML entity encoder
Private Function encode(ByVal s As String) As String
    If s = "&" Then
        encode = "&"
    ElseIf s = "< " Then
        encode = "<"
    ElseIf s = ">" Then
        encode = ">"
    ElseIf s = Chr(13) Then
        encode = "
"
    Else
        encode = s
    End If
End Function

The WordPress Incutio xml-parser will not pass content it cannot make sense of, which leaves you with an empty post.

using CDATA

A rather common hack I used above is using < ![CDATA[ ]]> to wrap the post content, which indicates to the wordpress xml-parser that I pass a string of raw character data as content. The parser ignores it, and WordPress stuffs everything in the database.

Works great, but it can backfire and slip stuff in the database that wordpress cannot handle and display correctly.

I’d test without using CDATA if you want to post from Word on a regular basis, or use a more professional html-converter on the word documents first.