Symphony.

I think we were just talking about this recently, but is there a way to do service calls to Symphony? (So, for example, you could hook up Textmate’s blogging bundle via XMLRPC.) This would also be a way to do an iPhone app, etc.

There was an XMLRPC extension for v1, and some talk a while back about porting it to v2. I think I remember even posting the original .zip file here on the forum, but can’t find it now. It should be around somewhere…

There has been some talk of this. Nick Dunn had a REST data api of sorts here but I don’t think its supported anymore. I’ve always thought an ATOM-based data api would be great.

I like this idea as well — specifically the XMLRPC integration. That aspect probably wouldn’t fit for all fields, but if it could be configured to know which of your sections was analogous to each blog piece (article, categories, media…) it could be pretty powerful.

Looking at it this way, it seems like that REST/ATOM API and an XMLRPC one would be two different things.

@beiju, agreed. I think out of the two, I’d actually rather have the XMLRPC piece, even though the REST API would probably provide more admin/developer functionality. My most common use case is to post entries from remote apps and whatnot.

Correct me if I’m wrong but XML-RPC kind of assumes that you have a fixed field structure of a blog, hence a single client like Mars Edit can interface with a whole suite of blogging platforms. One of Symphony’s blessings is that you can model almost anything, so I wonder how XML-RPC can work. Perhaps it would need some form of configuration like the XML Importer, where you map known objects (such as properties of the XML-RPC specification, or elements of the RSS or Atom specifications) onto fields in a Symphony section.

Nick Dunn had a REST data api of sorts here but I don’t think its supported anymore

I never had the time to follow through with it. However now Symphony 2 is really stable I’d like to revisit this and polish it off. As with many things, it’s added to my todo list :-)

Correct me if I’m wrong but XML-RPC kind of assumes that you have a fixed field structure of a blog

Exactly. What I’m saying is that when you have a site or section of a site designed to imitate a blog-focused CMS, it would be useful to let it communicate over XMLRPC. For example, a section of my upcoming website will be a blog (or similar to one, anyway) and I’d like to be able to create, edit, and publish articles using MarsEdit.

My idea about this proposed extension is to allow it to be configured to know which of your sections is the “blog-y” one, and then it would translate XMLRPC requests into the appropriate database calls. A REST API would probably be a separate extension.

Yeah, I think that’s right. It would either have to be configurable so you could tell it what fields to use, or, simply require specific sections/fields in order to use the XMLRPC extension. (The former would be nicer, the latter would be easier to do. :)

But isn’t XML-RPC kind of outmoded? I don’t really know; I haven’t used an RPC-speaking app & am not too familiar with it.

Looks like MarEdit, for instance, implemented AtomPub back in 2.2.

Wouldn’t an XML-RPC vs AtomPub be more-or-less for backwards compatibility?

I didn’t know that about AtomPub and MarsEdit. It all depends, then, if AtomPub is an emerging standard or an established one. If an AtomPub implementation can serve both purposes easily, then that sounds like the way to go.

Good question, I’m definitely not up to date on this stuff…I think XMLRPC is pretty well established but maybe it’s being upended by AtomPub. Looks like WordPress supports both, but the XMLRPC implementation is more complete.