I ran into a frustrating issue with recent efforts to add additional blogs to my iPhone WordPress app.
When trying to add the blog, I would get it to authenticate in the “Add Blog” section; however when I tried to connect to the blog I would get a “Communication Error. bad username or password” error message. Specs on the configurations are WordPress 3.0.1 and iOS WordPress v2.6.3. My research in the WordPress forums uncovered this to be a known bug (albeit hard to reproduce and resolve) in the iOS WordPress app. User comments included various efforts to resolve the problem. The steps I walked through to get a resolution are outlined below.
My failed attempts to resolve this issue included:
- Removing and re-adding the blog in the WordPress iPhone app.
- Verifying correct username/password combination and changing the password.
- Verify in wp-admin (under Settings > Writing) that Atom Publishing Protocol and XML-RPC are enabled for the blog.
- Using both the www.domain.com and domain.com in the URL field of the “Add Blog” form of the iPhone App.
- Including “/wp-admin” in the blog URL in the “Add Blog” form of the iPhone App.
The Solution:
After some time and effort reviewing numerous forum posts to find a solution I ran across a user suggesting to include the path to the xmlprc file on the website. For my efforts here the “Add Blog” fields on the WordPress iPhone app were the following:
- URL: domain.com/wp-admin
- Username: admin_username
- Password: site_password
- XML-RPC: domain.com/xmlrpc.php
Note: adding “/wp-admin” the the domain in the URL field enabled visibility of the XML-RPC fields for me to add the absolute path to the file on the wordpress install.
Why does this work? I don’t really have a great explanation. I just thought that because I struggled so much in authenticating a blog that I might save someone time and effort by posting/sharing my experience here.