The Aristophrenium

It took a couple of days of searching—mostly due to struggling with how to formulate the right search string, putting my Google-fu to the test—but I finally discovered the solution for WordPress stripping the angle brackets ‘<’ and ‘>’ from incoming code published remotely using Windows Live Writer. So when I publish this:

<p>Wit is educated insolence.</p>

What ends up getting published is this:

pWit is educated insolence./p

It seems that the problem is produced by a bug in the version of the LibXML2 software library that our site is running, which mangles XML-RPC requests when parsing XML. If you are running anything less than PHP version 5.2.9+ with LibXML2 version 2.7.3+ then you are likely to experience this problem. (Obviously this sort of stuff is way over my head, so you can see why I struggled with my searches.)

I talked to the technical support staff with our web hosting company but they were either unable or unwilling (I could not interpret which) to update the version of PHP and LibXML2 that we are running.

But surely there had to be some kind of fix available.

And there is!

Thanks to Joseph Scott and JoeWare.net the solution is very simple. Scott wrote a WordPress plugin that magically fixes the problem. From the Plugins menu at your WordPress dashboard, click “Add New” and search for LibXML2 Fix. Or you can click on the following link to download the plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/libxml2-fix/

Many thanks to WordPress Answers, Joseph Scott, and JoeWare.net!

• “WordPress and Windows Live Writer,” WordPress Answers (14 Sep 2011).
• “WordPress sites working incorrectly with Windows Live Writer (WLW),” JoeWare.net (21 Oct 2011).

Joseph Scott LibXML2 Windows Live Writer Wordpress XML XML-RPC