fault code -32700 parse error. not well formed

That’s what I’ve been getting when I tried to use any client to connect to my WordPress instance. The WP web UI worked fine and I wasn’t seeing any errors in the dashboard.

I’ve been trying to get back into the habit of using my micro.blog account for a while now, but kept having trouble with the micro.blog apps. I could read just fine, but I couldn’t post to micro.blog via the app (which in turn posts to my self-hosted WP blog).

This process used to work a few months ago and I thought it was a problem with micro.blog itself. After more investigating and some pointers from Manton Reese via Micro.blog support, I finally figured out the issue…

The server was missing the package php-xml. Turns out, WordPress will happily run without it and the xmlrpc endpoint will even respond with XML without it, but it won’t actually work. After doing a quick:

yum install php-xml

I was back in business. I’m surprised WordPress didn’t detect this and point out that a required package was missing. Maybe it did and it just didn’t make it obvious? I’m not really sure, but I see lots of people with the same issue when I search for the solution. I had to dig through several Google results to finally find the answer which was also surprising.

So if you get an error saying “fault code -32700” and “parse error. not well formed”, make sure your php-xml package is installed.