Upgrading to 2.1: Fixing the ecto Category Problem

Filed under: Useful Add-ons by Maria on January 26, 2007     Print This Post

I use ecto to post to all of my blog-based Web sites. It’s a great offline post composition/editing tool that gives me all of the tools I need to get the job done.

Yesterday, I updated this site to WordPress 2.1 Today, I discovered that I could no longer load or “refresh” the site’s entries in ecto. When I tried, ecto would get hung up while “retrieving categories” for the last entry created.

I poked around in the ecto support forum and came up with this thread. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one having the problem. The ecto folks claimed it was a WordPress problem that had to do with the xmlrpc.php file (which resides in the root directory of a WordPress installation). I followed the thread until I came up with this fix by gusleig:

You must edit your xmlrpc.php. Find:

'categoryId' => $catid,

and change to:

'categoryId' => (string) $catid,

I followed these instructions, saved the modified xmlrpc.php file, and tried ecto again. It worked.

The folks at WordPress are aware of the problem. If they haven’t already fixed this on WordPress.com, I assume they will shortly. And the xmlrpc.php file modification will be in place in the next release of WordPress, so be sure to make sure you have a problem before you try this fix.

1. Thanks for this! I just upgraded last night and had the same problem with Ecto today. This solution did the trick.

   Comment by Jim — January 29, 2007 @ 12:17 pm

2. how about adding the line to your instructions (980)?

   Comment by Harry — January 31, 2007 @ 1:58 pm

3. I’m not sure what you mean? Perhaps line number of the php file?

   I admit that I never use line numbers because line numbers change when files are edited. I always use my text editor’s search feature to find the text that needs replacing.

   Sorry! I’ll try to remember next time if it’s not likely that the line numbers will change.

   Comment by Maria — January 31, 2007 @ 2:04 pm

4. […] it didn’t grab the categories and posts from Wordpress. It just hung up. Well, thanks to this post I now have Ecto working with the 2.1 […]

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