Any quirks I should be aware of in Drupal's XML-RPC and BlogAPI implementations?

Question

I'm beginning work on a project that will access a Drupal site to create (and eventually edit) nodes on the site, via the XML-RPC facility and BlogAPI module shipped with Drupal. This includes file uploading, as the project is to allow people to upload pictures en mass to a Drupal site with minimal ado.

What I'd like to know is if there are any caveats I should look out for. Has anyone had experience targeting Drupal's XML-RPC implementation, or the implementation of any of the blogging APIs supported by its BlogAPI module? What advice would you give to others taking the same path?

Answer 1

While the XML-RPC facility is pretty stable and works well, the BlogAPI module has various issues, especially with discovery, that make using it for anything but regular blogs painful. Currently, there is no use of blogIds in the generated Really Simple Discovery document (of which only one exists for a site) or for the blogging APIs implemented in BlogAPI.

Which blog receives a post is determined by user credentials, which works fine as long as only one node type is available for access through BlogAPI, but when you try and have two or more node types available through the module, things tend to fall apart.

Looking at the state of BlogAPI in Drupal's HEAD on CVS, we might not see a solution to this until 8.x at the earliest. However, there are several people working on redeveloping BlogAPI as a third party module, perhaps to merge back in to Drupal core at some later date. If you want to use a well-known blogging API, it might be best to get involved with their effort. If it's something else, though, the XML-RPC facility provided through hook_xmlrpc() does a great job of letting you provide your own XML-RPC interfaces.