[If you don't know what the XML-RPC API is or don't care, please skip to the next or previous post]

As described here, the "metaWeblog.newPost" method "creates a new post, and optionally publishes it." It takes these parameters:

String blogid, String username, String password, struct content, boolean publish

The publish parameter doesn't do what you think it does. You can't use it to set a post's status to draft versus to publish. That issue is described here, complete with a workaround.

However, that workaround still won't let you create posts with a status of "future." For that, keep reading...

I wanted to set the status of entries to "future", and NoPublishMeansDraft doesn't help with that.

What I ended up doing is using my imperfect knowledge of Perl to edit [MT install directory]/lib/MT/XMLRPCServer.pm

In version 1.31 of that file (for MT 3.121), I inserted the following at line 165 in the newPost function:

## Java-like Perl courtesy of
## BigMediaBlog.com / Lonewacko.com
if ( defined $item->{mt_entry_status} ) {
my $statusString = $item->{mt_entry_status};
my $status = MT::Entry::status_int( $statusString )
or die MT::XMLRPCServer::_fault( "Value for mt_entry_status undefined (was '$statusString')" );
$entry->status( $status );
}

That should be inserted right after the following:

if ($mt->{cfg}->NoPublishMeansDraft) {
$entry->status($publish ? MT::Entry::RELEASE() : MT::Entry::HOLD());
} else {
$entry->status(MT::Entry::RELEASE());
}

I write Java, so there might be problems with that Perl or it might be possible to make it a one-liner. However, it seems to work. Sample code to use this:

import org.apache.xmlrpc.*;
import java.util.*;
// etc....
XmlRpcClient xmlrpc = new XmlRpcClient( "http://example.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi" );
params = new Vector();
params.add( "1" ); // your blog ID
params.add( "[*YOUR LOGIN NAME*]" );
params.add( "[*YOUR PASSWORD*]" );
hashtable = new Hashtable();
hashtable.put( "title", "TITLE" );
hashtable.put( "description", "ENTRY TEXT" );
hashtable.put( "dateCreated", "20041126T05:43:43" );
// mt_entry_status can be "draft", "future", "publish", or "review"
// if mt_entry_status is not given, the NoPublishMeansDraft controls
// as described here:
// http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/10/tip_xmlrpc_and_movable_type
// if mt_entry status is not one of the allowed values, a fault is sent back
hashtable.put( "mt_entry_status", "future" );
params.add( hashtable );
// the publish parameter;
// actually whether to rebuild the post or not; see also the link above
params.add( new Boolean( false ) );
String postID = (String) xmlrpc.execute( "metaWeblog.newPost", params );