TechAgility

So I don’t know if anyone has noticed something similar recently but shortly after my recent trip away I found that my Posts via “Windows Live Writer” were somehow being truncated or something similar and the Paragraph and Tagging syntax was getting muddled on my WordPress site.

At first I thought it might be Windows Live Writer as I had recently upgraded to a beta version 14.x… , so I downgraded (very bloody difficult that…), tried other blogging tools and found that this did not appear to be the root of the problem.

So as I was still on WordPress 2.2.3 I decided to upgrade the whole site and this time used funtastico to move from WordPress 2.2.3 to 2.6.5 – that was also not the cause of the problem.

Then tried taking a native post and cut and pasting in to wp-admin/write on the site and all worked well. So this would appear to indicate that the site was fine, but there appeared to be some issue with posting remotely, and that this wasn’t just related to “Windows Live Writer” exclusively.

So after a bit of research I’m seeing in these web links some details that this issue is caused by some variation of the lib files underpinning PHP? So I shot of an email to my Hosting company (OnyxServers) to see if they had any advice?

WordPress Bug Trac #7771 XMLRPC api stripping leading angle brackets
PHP Bug #45996 libxml2 2.7.1 causes breakage with character data in xml_parse()
http://www.geekyramblings.org/2008/09/20/wordpress-xml-rpc-error/

And it looks like this specific PHP libxml2 is linked to PHP 5.2.6 – or at least it is in the case of my hosting service?

So the answer I got was:

I did quite a bit of googling around and there are a few different suggestions as to what causes the problem and what might fix it. But most seem to point to libxml. It wasn’t clear to me which versions of libxml have the bug and whether the bug has fixed in the latest release. Either way, any change to libxml would require us to recompile PHP and Apache which is very risky.

However one suggestion I have is try running WordPress using PHP 4 instead of PHP 5 and see if the problem persists. This might be the easiest way to avoid the issue given your web site will work OK with PHP 4.

To try it out, create a .htaccess file in your public_html/ folder and enter the following in the file:
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php4 .php
Your PHP files will now run using PHP 4.4.9 and a different version of libxml.

Let me know if this works around the problem

And this has indeed worked for me. I can’t say it will work for everyone, as it will clearly depend on the particulars of how your hosting system is set up, but at least it’s one way that might be of some help?

And a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year to all ;-)

PS: Except the bs*%tards who broke in to my Brother-in-laws while we were all sleeping and took care of the ladies handbags, the wide screen TV and the car!!!!

Cheers,
Dave

written by dcaddick