I'm trying to write a simple PHP script which automatically sets up new etherpads (see http://etherpad.com/).

They don't have an API (yet) for creating new pads so I'm trying to figure if I can do things another way.

After playing around some, I found that if you append a random string to etherpad.com to a not-yet-created pad, it'll come back with a form asking if you want to create a new etherpad at that address. If you submit that form, a new pad will be created at that URL.

My thought then was I could just create a PHP script using CURL that would duplicate that form and trick etherpad into creating a new pad at whatever URL I give it. I wrote the script but so far I can't get it working. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

First, here's the HTML form on the etherpad creation page:

`

<p><tt id="padurl">http://etherpad.com/lsdjfsljfa-fdj-lsdf</tt></p>

<br/>
<p>There is no EtherPad document here. Would you like to create one?</p>

<input type="hidden" value="lsdjfsljfa-fdj-lsdf" name="padId"/>
<input type="submit" value="Create Pad" id="createPad"/>

`

Then here's my code which tries to submit the form using CURL

$ch = curl_init();

//set POST variables
$url = "http://etherpad.com/ep/pad/create?padId=ldjfal-djfa-ldkfjal";
$fields = array(
  'padId'=>urlencode("ldjfal-djfa-ldkfjal"),
);

$useragent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30)";  

// set user agent  
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent); 

//url-ify the data for the POST
foreach($fields as $key=>$value) { $fields_string .= $key.'='.$value; }
print_r($fields_string);

//open connection
$ch = curl_init();

//set the url, number of POST vars, POST data
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST,count($fields));
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$fields_string);

//execute post
$result = curl_exec($ch);
print_r($result);
//close connection
curl_close($ch);

When I run the script, PHP reports back that everything executed correctly but etherpad doesn't create my pad. Any clues what's going on?