So, WordPress 2.3 beta adds support for AtomPub. All good. I installed it (separately to this blog, I'm just playing around), but all I could get out of the APE was a 401, even though I'd provided the correct authentication credentials. Looking at the code, with liberal use of the logging therein, I worked out that PHP_AUTH_* weren't being set, so I pulled out some auth code and tried it on it's own. No luck. Weird. I then grabbed a previously working snippet and tried that, but it was broken too. On both the servers to which I have easy access. I sent the snippet to Donal, and the snippet worked for him. WTF?

Turns out, that both the servers I was testing on are running PHP as a CGI, not using mod_php, and if PHP is being run as a CGI PHP_AUTH_* aren't available. Who knew? Well, someone, but not me. And they knew a workaround too.

Thanks for your help, Donal! And to all the cool people who are working on this (Elias Torres, Pete Lacey, Sam Ruby, Tim Bray get special mention).

The APE now exercises my beta blog. Now I have to work out why it can't delete stuff ...