Now completing the fourth week of coding, the AtomPub importer is finally starting to take shape. This week I managed to retrieve trackbacks, successfully start importing the previously retrieved data into WordPress, and added a user interface enhancement.

Trackbacks Are Go

If you remember last week, I had some difficulties getting trackbacks working. Well, thankfully that is no longer the case. Earlier this week Joseph Scott helped me figure out the code needed for accessing TypePad’s XML-RPC API. With this addition, all standard blog data is now being imported.

Importing is Go

After solving the trackback dilemma, I started working on actually importing the array’s retrieved from the AtomPub server. Since much of the import code is shared between other WordPress importers, this process went fairly quickly. I only needed to make a few minor adjustments on some code, and by Thursday arrays were becoming rows in WordPress’ database.

Notifications Are Go

After testing importing several times, a logical enhancement occurred to me. Occasionally the AtomPub server can take a while to respond and feed the data into WordPress. During this time, a user would be sitting at the initial page with no notification of activity other than the browser’s loading notification. This event could have raised suspicions that the page was not loading, when in fact everything was working perfectly. So, I added a small throbber and message text while the importing occurs. The enhancement is small, but it should bring a piece of mind to those getting antsy.

Bugs Are Go

What would a coding project be without bugs. Today, my mentor Lloyd notified me of several small bugs. It turns out the importer has been generating warning messages left and right. I’ve been oblivious to this since apparently MAMP had PHP error reporting disabled. I have since enabled error reporting, and will start fixing the small bugs early next week.

Unfortunately, a major bug was also discovered. Lloyd found that only 20 entries will import. Since I’ve been working with only a few entries at a time, I had not run into this problem yet. I suspect the issue is with the AtomPub server, and an additional request will be needed for each set entries over 20. I’ll know more next week when I take a closer look at the issue.

Ronald is coding …and he has a plan.

I hope someone gets the above reference. Anyway, as you may have guessed, the early part of next week will focus solely on tackling the bugs found today. Hopefully the issues will not be problematic so I can begin the next task: allowing users to select an author to import all entries under. Once the author override code is committed, the next step on my coding agenda is to finally write the code to automatically the detect the AtomPub URL based on the website’s blog address. Those three items should keep me busy next week, and as always, I’ll let you know next week how the coding went.