Windows Live Writer and WordPress Error – Invalid response document returned from XmlRcp Server….SOLUTION
May 6th, 2008 Posted in WordPress
Today, I upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1, which I am glad to say was really simple. Along with this, one of my colleagues suggested I try Windows Live Writer as a blogging tool to post to this blog, so I installed it.
When you first open Windows Live Writer it has to query your blog via the xmlrpc.php file in the WordPress root directory. However, when I tried this I kept receiving the following error;
“Invalid response document returned from the XmlRcp sever”
After a bit of digging around the WordPress files and folders, here is how I fixed it;
1. Open your favourite text editor (I like Notepad++ because it also shows me characters that some editors can hide).
2. Open the following four files and check for extra characters after the closing PHP tag (which looks like “?>”). If you find ANY blank spaces or blank lines after this closing tag, delete them.
- wp-blog-header.php
- wp-config.php
- wp-settings.php
- xmlrcp.php
3. Save your files and upload them to your server.
4. Try Windows Live Writer again and hopefully enjoy using it
Tags: windows live writer, WordPress
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4 Responses to “Windows Live Writer and WordPress Error – Invalid response document returned from XmlRcp Server….SOLUTION”
By Christy on Sep 24, 2008
Thanks! I’ve been struggling with this for months now!
By Stewart on Nov 14, 2008
Wow! I just came across this.
THANK YOU!
By electric gate on Dec 11, 2009
Wish your blog was easier to find but well worth the time searching, thanks for this. bp
By Sylvain on Mar 4, 2010
Well, it looks like that even in 2010, there are still a lot of potential communication problems between Windows Live Writer (WLW) and a PHP based XML-RPC blog server.
On my blog, I’ve recently posted an article on how to solve many of these problems by first identifying them precisely using either the log file of WLW and/or an HTML traffic capturing tool such as Fiddler. Beside the log file and Fiddler, this article also covers in detail some of the most common problems such a the presence of an UTF-8 BOM at the beginning of one of the PHP script files or the presence of extraneous characters at either the beginning (before the opening tag ) of one of those PHP script files.
You can find this article there:
http://coding-paparazzi.sylvainlafontaine.com/2010/02/solving-connection-problems-wlw.html
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.