Sometimes you want to get access to your Wordpress content (blog posts, pages, categories, etc) from external sources. for example if you want to use a different front end such as Flash, or edit your posts from different software (such as the Flock Browser).

Wordpress allows you to do this using Wordpress XML-RPC which are remote function calls using XML. If you are using Action Script (say via Flex) there is a as3 xml-rpc library you can use to make this simpler. As noted in my previous post, the library requires a small tweak or you can download my recompiled as3 xml-rpc library file. You need to put this in the libs directory in your project.

A typical call to Wordpress might be: makeCall(“metaWeblog.getRecentPosts”,[_blogid,_user,_password,count]). After doing some research the blog id isn’t used by a non-MU Wordpress website so I just put ‘1′ in there.

Here’s another good tutorial on using XML-RPC with Flex. You can get more information on what is XML-RPC.

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As you may know, with Wordpress 2.7 you can now upgrade through the admin panel without uploading any files, etc. I recently got an error when upgrading automatically from 2.7 to 2.7.1. After a bit of googling I found this blog post: fatal error upgrading Wordpress.

Turns out you need to deactivate the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin which is basically no longer required. You may not have this plugin installed so you won’t have this problem.

As you know, Wordpress is a content management system. Originally meant for blogs, it can and should be used to create websites. This allows you to edit your web pages within the browser. Best of all, it’s free!

One of the nice new features is being able to upgrade Wordpress and install plugins right from the browser. No more downloading and ftp files to the server!

There are also huge improvements and customization options for the interface. Check out Wordpress 2.7 today!