MovableType and XML-RPC

This post will likely be of no interest to most (all?) of the people who read this site. But, it’s information I really needed to know, so someone else may find it useful…

I’ve been playing around with the XML-RPC API for MovableType, and was having serious bother with the mt.setPostCategories method. I just couldn’t get it to take.

What I needed to know, and the little bit of knowledge I state plainly and clearly here and now, is that the categoryId is not the category label (in the case of this post, ‘G33k’) - rather, it is the numerical ID by which your MovableType install recognises the category (for this post, ‘4’).

To find this out for a specific category manually, have a nosey at the URLs linked to in the categories page of your blog control panel. To do it in your script, muck around with the mt.getCategoryList method.

There, I told you you weren’t interested :-)

And why did I need to know this? I’m working on a little project that likely serves no useful purpose, but is fun to play about with. All will be clear once I get it going…