BlogDesk and b2evolution
BlogDesk is my latest greatest discovery. I've tried multiple blog clients, among them - Windows Live Writer, w.bloggar, dotPost, and maybe a couple of others. BlogDesk is definitely the nicest of them all.
It didn't work out of the box, for some reason, b2evolution (the blog engine used on this site) is not included in the list of supported blogs (which is definitely a show stopper for the inexperienced end-user). Knowing that b2evo supports the MetaWeblog API, I knew that BlogDesk should work with it (this is the beauty of developing standards and then creating standards-compliant products).
Initially, it didn't. The problem was fixed easily, after I contacted the author of BlogDesk (and received an instant reply, wow!). The program's built-in logging mode allowed me to understand that out-of-the-box, b2evo's XMLRPC communication mechanism will also send some debugging information along with the reply to the requests that come from the blog client. That debugging information was not parsed correctly, resulting in an error - thus the inability to use the software.
If you've encountered the same problem, you should edit /xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php in b2evo's folder, and comment out all the calls to the xmlrpc_debugmsg function. Once you do that, everything should work.
Update: In b2evolution 2.x, the following file must be edited: /inc/xmlrpc/apis/_metaweblog.api.php
This is the first post I make using BlogDesk, I'll definitely stick to this program. I'd like to thank Johannes Oppermann, the program's author, for creating such a nice product and giving it away for free. I'm impressed.
P.S. So far I was unable to post entries that contain Russian or Romanian characters using this tool, I'm still working on that.
Kirstin — 2007-04-26 22:55
Hi! My name is Kirstin. I come from Germany.
So please excuse my bad english.
I try to get blogdesk working with b2evolution since a few hours… Without any success… Now I found your blog…
Can you explaine me in “simple words” (not for specialists” ;o), what this means:
“and comment out all the calls to the xmlrpc_debugmsg function”
Or what I have to do exactly in this file?
This would be a great help to me and very kind of you!!!
Thank you very, very much. :o)
gr8dude — 2007-04-27 04:35
Hi Kristin, I’ve replied to your message on the b2evo forums, but I think the message was sent to myself (I sent it again, but there was no effect).
I know the error you’re dealing with, I have it too on one site I manage. If I pictured things correctly, that is a different error, not the one which is solved by “commenting the lines".
The error occurs on 1.9, but on 1.8 (this site) everything is fine. I’ve used some troubleshooting tips from the author of BlogDesk, and I suceeded in determining that BlogDesk works fine, and concluded that the problem is on the server side.
And now I am sure about it, since you’re saying that you have the same error with another version of b2evolution.
Commenting out the lines means the following; picture that you have this line in the file
It should become (notice ‘//’ in the beginning):
Sometimes the function call is split into multiple lines:
In this case you should comment both lines
You can find all these lines by searching for “xmlrpc_debugmsg” in this file on the server /xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php
I’ll send you an email, if you’re not sure how to do that, and if there is no programmer around (a programmer is familiar with comments in code), you can send me the file and I will apply the changes.
garrisonclark — 2007-07-28 11:22
I am trying also to get wysiwyg editing inside of or posting to b2evolution, but I am technically not advanced enough to follow the directions for fckeditor integration, and am lost with live writer setup….if anyone can give me an idea of the best solution between blogdesk, live writer and fckeditor, and/or help me get it going…i’d REALLY appreciate it…i have no clue what needs to be done…
gr8dude — 2007-07-28 14:48
I prefer BlogDesk, and I still use it for maintaining this site.
LiveWriter generates a lot of redundant tags, and I can’t edit the article in the web-interface once its uploaded by LiveWriter (b2evo won’t accept the changes because of the existing redundant tags which were accepted only via XML-RPC).
FCkeditor requires experimenting with b2evo itself on the server, i never tried that.
BlogDesk is the way to go, having a very simple configuration. Perhaps you have some specific questions about one setting or anotheR?
Moisés — 2008-05-23 09:13
Hi Alex,
Thank you for your help. The solution for me was slightly different, since I was using b2evolution 2.4.2 and BlogDesk 2.8.
The problem for me arrived when I was trying to download the categories. The error message say something about a non valid comment in line 23.
The solution was comment out the xmlrpc_debugmsg calls to, but in the file:
/inc/xmlrpc/apis/_metaweblog.api.php.
Cheers.
gr8dude — 2008-05-23 15:35
Moisés, thanks for the feedback; I knew about that because I had to go through the same procedure when updating b2evo on another site I manage. But it didn’t occur to me that it would be a good idea to update this article :-)
Thanks