On WordPress Pingbacks
WordPress supports Pingbacks and these are enabled by default. Having noticed a missing pingback from one of my posts and having made sure that it wasn’t caught as spam or still pending, I decided to investigate a bit and try to resend it manually.
Armed with the Pingback specification, and the XML-RPC RFC, I was able to successfully have a request cURLed over.
curl "https://.../xmlrpc.php" --header "Content-Type: text/xml" --data "<?xmlversion="1.0"?><methodCall><methodName>pingback.ping</methodName><params><param><value><string>https://.../</string></value></param><param><value><string>https://.../</string></value></param></params></methodCall>"
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>pingback.ping</methodName>
<params>
<param>
<value><string>https://.source./</string></value>
</param>
<param>
<value><string>https://.target./</string></value>
</param>
</params>
</methodCall>
For which I got a nice response:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodResponse>
<params>
<param>
<value>
<string>Pingback from https://.source./ to https://.target./ registered. Keep the web talking! :-)</string>
</value>
</param>
</params>
</methodResponse>
Mission accomplished, got the Pingback thorough, great! But what if…?