Quick Fix for Xanga Crosspost 0.1 Login Issue

Joe Tan has released a number of WordPress plugins available on his site. At present I use a couple of them: the Google Analytics & Feedburner Report and the Flickr Photo Album plugins.

Update: Joe’s latest release has fixed this particular issue. It looks like users might be experiencing a similar problem with ver 0.5 but I am unable to reproduce the error. Keep an eye on Joe’s page for another fix.

It was while browsing these tools that I came across his Xanga Crosspost for Wordpress plugin. I had no idea what Xanga even was or what this plugin did but upon viewing Joe’s Xanga page it became immediately obvious to me how useful the plugin might be. If nothing else perhaps it could leave a crumb trail for increased traffic.

Trouble with Xanga

After downloading and installing the plugin (which was effortless I might add). I then opened the Plugin configuration page to link my Xanga account with my Wordpress installation.

However when I submitted my Xanga username and password I received an “Error: Invalid username or password”. After retyping this several times and then copying and pasting the same credentials I used on Xanga’s site directly it became obvious to me that the problem was not my username or password.

After checking back in at the plugin homepage I noticed 4 recent comments describing the same problem. Something must have changed on Xanga’s end of things. But according to his site, Joe’s out of town for the holidays… if I want this working today it looks like I’ll have to hack it.

After playing around a bit with the code it became clear that the problem is most likely due to Xanga moving the “Set-Cookie” information to an unusual place. Anyway… below is a fix for the plugin.

Update lib.xanga.php

The default installation for this file is in <your plugins directory>\tantan\xanga\lib.xanga.php

Go ahead and replace the 2nd instance of the following (line 82ish):

$this->cookies = $this->req->getResponseCookies();

With this:

$this->cookies = $this->req->getResponseCookies('body');

Note: Only change the 2nd instance of the above code; leave the first instance of “$this->cookies = $this->req->getResponseCookies();” untouched.

Update curl.php

When I installed the Xanga Crosspost plugin, my <plugins directory>\tantan\lib\curl.php was replaced with another version. After comparing the two it appears that the version which came with the plugin is actually older than the one it replaced. No worries, they both didn’t work and the only difference between the two is the getResponseCookies() function - which we are about to append.

Replace the entire getResponseCookies() function with this:

// Indenting reduced for blog readability
function getResponseCookies($header='header') {
   $hdrCookies = array();
   if ($header == 'header') {
      foreach ($this->response[$header] as
       $key => $value) {
         if (strtolower($key) == ’set-cookie’) {
            $hdrCookies = array_merge($hdrCookies,
            explode(”\n”, $value));
         }
      }
   }elseif($header == ‘body’) {
      $hdrTemp = array();
      $hdrTemp =
        explode(”\n”, ((string)$this->response['body']));
      foreach ($hdrTemp as $val) {
         list($name, $value) = split(”:”, $val);
         if (strtolower($name) == ’set-cookie’) {
            $hdrCookies[] =
             str_replace(”Set-Cookie: “, “”, $val);
         }
      }
   }

   $cookies = array();
   foreach ($hdrCookies as $cookie) {
      if ($cookie) {
         list($name, $value) = explode(’=', $cookie, 2);
         list($value, $domain, $path, $expires) =
          explode(’;', $value);
         $cookies[$name] =
          array(’name’ => $name, ‘value’ => $value);
      }
   }

   return $cookies;
}

That’s it - worked for me and it shouldn’t mess up any other tan-tan plugins that use the same library. Post any questions regarding this fix in the comments and I’ll be happy to address them.

Thanks again to Joe for his great plugin - be sure to view his other tools as well.

(Joe - if you’d like any more information on this issue for a future release please contact me.)

Additional Resources

• Zip Download
• Plugin Home Page