I upgraded to Word­Press 2.3.1 last week and for the most part, all seemed to go well. Even though I’m not actu­ally dis­play­ing any tags for my posts yet, I wanted to get upgraded quickly so that I could start work­ing on gen­er­at­ing tags for new and old posts. It’s going to be a lot of back-​breaking labor to get caught up (okay fine, slight exaggeration).

I noticed a couple of days ago that when I tried to post to the site using the Text­mate blog­ging bundle, I was get­ting the fol­low­ing error at the top of the window.

Received exception:Missing return value!

Nor­mally when you post suc­cess­fully from Text­Mate, all sorts of meta­data is appended to the top of you post in Text­Mate, includ­ing the perma­link for the post. It also auto­mat­i­cally opens a new tab to the post in your web browser.

When I started get­ting this error both the perma­link append­ing and web browser page open­ing func­tions stopped work­ing. Oddly enough, the entry was still actu­ally posted to my blog. I imme­di­ately assumed that this error had some­thing to do with the new tag­ging fea­tures and that maybe the Text­Mate blog­ging bundle wasn’t quite up to snuff. No prob­lem, Google to the rescue.

Amaz­ingly, my Google searches turned up almost noth­ing useful on the sub­ject. Even­tu­ally, I recov­ered one tiny little detail using “word­press 2.3 xmlrpc error” as my search term.

The solu­tion appears in a com­ment by Daniel Jalkut on the Red Sweater Blog.

…my first reac­tion when I see that kind of vague error is that a plugin in your Word­Press instal­la­tion is incom­pat­i­ble with WP 2.3. By any chance are you run­ning the Google Sitemap Gen­er­a­tor plugin? It’s one that has been iden­ti­fied by a few users as need­ing update after going to 2.3. See:

http://​www.​red-​sweater.​com/​f​o​r​u​m​s​/​v​i​e​w​t​o​p​i​c​.​p​h​p​?​i​d=424

If you’re not run­ning that, it could be another plugin. Gen­er­ally the “XML-RPC Response Pars­ing Failed” hap­pens when some plugin causes the entire fetch to fail, so Word­Press just returns a blank response instead of an XML document.

While the error in ques­tion was actu­ally some­what dif­fer­ent than mine, I do in fact use the Google Sitemap plugin. I dis­abled the plugin and tried post­ing again. Bingo, prob­lem solved.

UPDATE: The ver­sion of the Google Sitemap plugin that was giving me this prob­lem was 2.7.1. My Word­Press install indi­cated that there wasn’t an update for this plugin, but when I actu­ally went to the site I found that there was one. The new ver­sion is 3.0.1 and seems to work fine. The admin inter­face also looks much better.