{"id":3853,"date":"2022-04-26T16:29:04","date_gmt":"2022-04-26T20:29:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/?p=3853"},"modified":"2022-04-26T16:29:04","modified_gmt":"2022-04-26T20:29:04","slug":"changes-to-wordpress-com-authentication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/3853\/changes-to-wordpress-com-authentication","title":{"rendered":"Changes to WordPress.com Authentication"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently WordPress.com revised its pricing structure, switching from a complex variety of paid plans to a <a href=\"https:\/\/wordpress.com\/pricing\/?aff=9642&#038;cid=1298400\">simpler approach<\/a> in which users can either stick with a free plan, or pay $15\/month for a variety of upgraded features.<\/p>\n<p>Among the features now offered at the $15\/month level are plugins and custom themes, which used to be included only with the more expensive &#8220;business&#8221; plans. This is a great change for users, but it exposes a huge number of WordPress.com users to an authentication issue that previously only affected the higher-cost plans.<\/p>\n<p>The problem: WordPress.com&#8217;s implementation of the WordPress XMLRPC API doesn&#8217;t accept standard WordPress.com &#8220;Application Passwords&#8221; for these updated blogs.  Application passwords are the unique, generated passwords that you must use for 3rd party apps such as MarsEdit when you have enabled Two-Step Authentication on a blog.<\/p>\n<p>Luckily there is a workaround. It requires deliving into the legacy &#8220;WP-Admin&#8221; interface of the affected site, and generating san application password in the standard WordPress back-end, independently from WordPress.com&#8217;s own higher-level interface.<\/p>\n<p>In light of the increased number of users who will be needing to figure negotiate this change, I updated the Red Sweater help pages to more fully document the process for generating application passwords, whether you&#8217;re on a free WordPress.com plan, or one of the newly unified paid plans. Read more here: <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/help.redsweater.com\/marsedit\/wordpress-com-auth\/\">Red Sweater Help: WordPress.com Authentication<\/a><\/p>\n<p>It would be great if WordPress.com fixed their XMLRPC API support so that standard WordPress.com application passwords worked on upgraded sites. It&#8217;s always been a little ironic that the user experience for <em>paying WordPress.com users<\/em>, in this one respect anyway, is worse than it is for  those with free sites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently WordPress.com revised its pricing structure, switching from a complex variety of paid plans to a simpler approach in which users can either stick with a free plan, or pay $15\/month for a variety of upgraded features. Among the features now offered at the $15\/month level are plugins and custom themes, which used to be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marsedit","category-wordpress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3853"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3854,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3853\/revisions\/3854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}