Posting to LiveJournal with PHP (phpBB)

Since the rss2lj service by david_m got blocked, I decided to figure out how to wire up sending entries to a blog from the site itself via PHP. I immediately found a simple class using XML-RPC, by andreynikishaev. Only the script package itself had no way to send a post to a community and, as it turned out later, there was no way to disable autoformatting of the sent post.

I had to keep searching. I found how to specify the community in the usejournal variable in the LiveJournal API documentation, and there's also a link there about adding metadata to the post in the props variable, which includes disabling autoformatting via the opt_preformatted parameter. Only the class I downloaded didn't allow for passing nested parameters, as I understood it, so I had to rework it a bit, including the class for working with XML-RPC in the main script as well, although I could have downloaded a more advanced solution or written my own, but I didn't want to spend the extra time.

I spent about 4 hours on the whole thing, but most of the time went into adding news formatting for LiveJournal and the check for which news items had already been published. I apologize to those who, before lunch, had a bunch of duplicate news items crawling into their feed from bigcats_ru. But now the entries get sent semi-automatically from the phpBB forum to LiveJournal, and if you set up cron, then automatically. Too bad there's just no time to search for and post news about big cats.