> As you may have noticed, the Wordpress plugin and possibly some of your
> applications have been affected by some unexpected service disruption issues
> since last night (approximately 16:00 BST).

> This was caused by our rollout of the new codebase (build 896) last night
> and some unexpected issues with certain specific types of request.
> We have now rolled back to the previous version (build 892), and service
> should have returned to normal.

> The issues in detail

> Firstly, the old codebase was more forgiving of invalid url parameters than
> the new one.  The Wordpress plugin has an unfortunate issue where it builds
> a query against the api with all the parameters that it might need
> regardless of whether it will use them.  So while we suggest that you
> conduct a default search against the api by hitting

> http://content.guardianapis.com/search?q=wordpress&show-fields=headli...

> The Wordpress plugin constructs a url that looks like

> http://content.guardianapis.com/search?&api-key=APIKEY&q=wordpress&ta...

> The presence of the empty page parameter (amongst others) was considered by
> the new system to be an error, and the appropriate json error response was
> returned  "{"response":{"status":"error","message":"page must be an
> integer"}}".
> To further complicate issues, the wordpress plugin also does not validate
> the responses that it gets back from the API and ensure that it got a
> successful response and so it was giving a very generic error message
> telling you that your API key was no longer valid.
> Rolling back should have fixed this problem, and we are working on fixing
> this issue at both ends.
> The next build of the content-api will correctly interpret an empty value as
> requesting a suitable default, exactly as if you had left it off, and we
> will be updating the wordpress plugin to correctly build it's query string
> so as to not include empty keys, and to validate the response and return the
> error code reported by the API up to the user.

> The second issue may have affected a small subset of you who have built your
> own application and were calling a specific url,
> content.guardianapis.com/.json or content.guardianapis.com/.xml
> It seems that our conversion code did not handle this rather unique url
> correctly, and would return a failure back to the client.
> If you used either the query parameter format, or as modeled by our Scala
> API, the Accept header, then you would have got a correct response, and your
> application would have continued to work as normal.

> We apologise for any issue that this may have caused you, and we are taking
> steps to ensure that these urls are added to our test framework to ensure
> that we cannot release code that regresses these issues again.

> Michael Brunton-Spall
> Developer Advocate
> guardian.co.uk

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