WordPress and Windows Live Writer XmlRpc server problem solutions

December 18, 2007 – 7:40 am

So after installing my snazzy new blog, changing the theme and playing with the plugins, I decided to try the Windows Live Writer. A friend of mine has warmly recommended it and since he is a sucker for WP, I reckoned it is a good bet.

So I download it and install it and when I try to connect my blog to it, I get the following message:

“Invalid Server Response – The response to the blogger.getUsersBlogs method received from the weblog server was invalid: Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server.”

OK. I couldn’t expect to get it from the first try. So I uninstall the WLW. Nothing. I reinstall the WordPress. Nothing. I change the hosting. Nothing.

So I turn to Google in despair and find four different solutions:

  1. There is a problem with the PHP version. Solution: the following code should be added to the top of the xmlrpc.php file:

    $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA = file_get_contents(“php://input”);

    Source

  2. There is a problem with .htaccess. The following code should be added to the .htaccess file:

    <Files xmlrpc.php>
    SecFilterInheritance Off
    </Files>

    Source

  3. There is a clash between WLW and some of the installed plugins. Disable the clashing plugins.

    Source

  4. There are some extra lines in all kind of files that xmlrpc.php is referring to so the php functions calling those file are not able to execute. Solution: Use Fiddler to monitor the HTTP traffic between the WLW and your hosting and find the calls to files that are giving the error. Source

Well, needless to say, none of those worked for me. However in the comments of the solution #4, I find the following gem:

Check the WLW log as well. Go to Help, About and click on the Show Log File link.

Well, I try and find the following lines in the WLW log:

<b>Warning</b>: include_once(public_html/www.seo-scientist.com/wp-includes/class-IXR.php) [<a href=’function.include-once’>function.include-once</a>]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in <b>/public_html/www.seo-scientist.com/xmlrpc.php</b> on line <b>43</b><br />
<b>Warning</b>: include_once() [<a href=’function.include’>function.include</a>]: Failed opening ‘/public_html/www.seo-scientist.com/wp-includes/class-IXR.php’ for inclusion in <b>/public_html/www.seo-scientist.com/xmlrpc.php</b> on line <b>43</b><br />
<b>Fatal error</b>: Class ‘IXR_Server’ not found in <b>/public_html/www.seo-scientist.com/xmlrpc.php</b> on line <b>73</b><br />

Just to translate: xmlrpc.php was trying to access the class named class-IXR.php from line 43 and line 73 and not finding it in the /wp-include/ directory. So I access the directory and I see that the stupid FTP client has converted all my filenames to lowercase. One change of one filename and everything works perfectly.

You can’t beat the feeling…

  1. 29 Responses to “WordPress and Windows Live Writer XmlRpc server problem solutions”

  2. Branko you #1 congrats!
    good luck with the blog it looks promising

    By tzvika avnery on Dec 18, 2007

  3. Oh my God, thank you very, very much! 🙂 I nearly gave up to solve this… Just one little checkbox “convert file names to lowercase” in FTP manager and sooooooo much trouble. Thank you! 🙂

    By Gabo on Dec 25, 2007

  4. Hey Gabo,

    I’m so glad I could help.

    Cheers

    By Neyne on Dec 29, 2007

  5. Hello, I currently have the same problem, but I can’t solve it. I tried to use the :

    SecFilterInheritance Off

    but it gives me a fatal error. Where should I write them down on .htaccess? I tried to investigate the file names too but no luck. Please help. Thanks a bunch!

    By AW on Feb 4, 2008

  6. I found my error using fiddler. In my case it was a fatal memory error in one the php scripts. I solved the problem using the information at the following web page…

    http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/04/23/php-allowed-memory-size-exchausted-fatal-error/#comment-470471

    By Peter on Mar 6, 2008

  7. http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/04/23/php-allowed-memory-size-exchausted-fatal-error/

    By Peter on Mar 6, 2008

  8. Thanks a lot ! It was installed plugins… Just desactivate it and reactivate after the publishing. Yooo… 🙂

    By Erikheus on Apr 13, 2008

  9. big problem with plugins…you have to keep updating wordpress for new ones and then sometimes old ones don’t work anymore

    By Guitar Bob on Apr 27, 2008

  10. best online casino top bonus casino online best

    By worldwide casino best online on Jul 27, 2008

  11. classes san cooking classes county cooking

    By cooking williamsburg, classes on Jul 27, 2008

  12. cartoon sex porn xxx xxx rated cartoons xxx toon games anime lesbian xxx

    By uvzypoqbajza on Aug 9, 2008

  13. This is good info. I\’m still reviewing my notes. Thanks a million.

    By Internet Adviser delivers reliable marketing results. on Aug 14, 2008

  14. Amazing… Great stuff once again, that has helped us out.

    By Bill Ross on Aug 20, 2008

  15. You’re a genius!!! I’ve been trying to solve that for something like 18 months and my admins almost started to hate me. Needless to say, all the other solutions didn’t work – yours did!!! Thank you Thank you Thank you!

    By Nomad93 on Aug 22, 2008

  16. rapidshare hentai keikoku hentai keikoku ball

    By simpsons keikoku hentai on Sep 5, 2008

  17. Great information. Thanks for the continued data driven analysis

    By computer questions on Sep 26, 2008

  18. Hi J,

    This is Kamal from Bangalore, India. I recently launched my website http://burnyourfuel.com, I use to post all my posts with the help of Windows live writer, But for the past two days i am unable to post due to the following reason

    1) Once a post is posted it opens like i wrote in codes, which is not in a readeable format. So i am worried about my site rank.

    So i am creating a new post for your reference so you can easily check and give me a proper solution for this.

    I am not a coding guy, i am just a commerce student, so please let me known in a language which i can understand.

    So of the things which i need to know is there is a problem in wordpress or in live writer

    If any of these two, where is the real problem ?

    Thanks in Advance, Awaiting reply.

    Kamal.
    http://burnyourfuel.com

    By Kamal on Oct 12, 2008

  19. Hi Kamal,

    Thumbs up on putting effort into your comment. Thumbs down on finding the blog on do-follow list. Pity they don’t make “manual nofollow blogs” list.

    By Neyne on Oct 12, 2008

  20. Great article

    By Manchester SEO on Nov 7, 2008

  21. My current WP version is 2.6.5

    I just replaced xmlrpc.php file with the same file, but from version 2.6.3 and it works!

    By Alexey on Dec 9, 2008

  22. How are you? your website is rocks
    I have a new band and we just had a live gig u can see here:
    http://tinyurl.com/8lxnsg

    By Parstyday on Dec 27, 2008

  23. Good post!I also have something about SEO to share. Check out my website.679

    By SEO Tool on Dec 27, 2008

  24. Great post. Thanks for sharing!
    I also have something about SEO to share. Check out at my website please.329

    By SEO on Dec 27, 2008

  25. janet jackson nude

    By hpusuwil on Mar 1, 2009

  26. WordPress is far better than the latter

    By rock & republic jeans on Aug 9, 2009

  27. Well, it looks like that even in 2010, there are still a lot of potential communication problems between Windows Live Writer (WLW) and a XML-RPC blog server.

    On my blog, I’ve recently posted the first part of an article on how to solve many of these problems by first identifying them precisely using the log file of WLW and/or an HTML traffic capturing tool such as Fiddler:

    http://coding-paparazzi.sylvainlafontaine.com/2010/02/solving-connection-problems-wlw.html

    Beside the log file and Fiddler, this part one covers the specific problems of the presence of a an UTF-8 BOM at the beginning of one of the PHP script files (often, this will be the wp-config.php file in the case of WordPress) and of the presence of extraneous characters at either the beginning (before the opening tag ) of one of the PHP script files.

    In the second part (soon to be published), I will cover the problem of the presence of Warning and of Fatal PHP error messages in the XML-RPC response file. Fatal errors are usually the result of some kind of error in the PHP code but you can get a Warning error message simply by having a badly set php.ini file; so it’s often simply a local configuration problem of PHP.

    By sylvain on Mar 4, 2010

  1. 3 Trackback(s)

  2. Dec 19, 2007: Sphinn gets your site indexed in Google in just a few hours | SEO Scientist - Applying the scientific method to SEO
  3. May 27, 2009: WordPress and Windows Live Writer XmlRpc server problem solutions | Cast Iron Cookware
  4. Sep 27, 2009: XMLRPC Invalid Server Response | SETUIX.com

Sorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.