I have another pro-bono non-profit site I support, where I set up an automatic feed for news items. When an item is given a particular tag in Pocket, it’s picked up by IFTTT and then posted as a post on the destination WordPress site, which becomes a short summary for the site’s front page. You can see the various articles about halfway down at USSPI.org.
In December, this stopped working. I didn’t notice it for a few weeks, then added it as an item on my to-do list to dive into. This weekend, I made that dive.
The first place I looked was the IFTTT recipe itself between Pocket and WordPress. Those recipes were firing, but a look into IFTTT’s log page showed it was actually the IFTTT WordPress channel that wasn’t firing. Opening up the page for that channel showed that IFTTT was no longer connecting to WordPress for some reason.
IFTTT has its own username and password on that WordPress site for posting articles, and I very carefully made sure those were entered correctly. I could log in properly in WordPress, but IFTTT wouldn’t allow it.
So I turned off all the plugins. Now, IFTTT could login. Hmm… As it turns out, there’s an XML-RPC security setting in iThemes Security. If you set it to block all XML-RPC, then IFTTT can’t talk to WordPress. It would have been nice if IFTTT mentioned that XML-RPC was being used, but hey, it’s a free service. In any case, I set the security to block XML-RPC pings and trackbacks, but allow authorized XML-RPC requests, and now the mashup is working correctly again.
