WordPress Webmentions Plugin Version 4.0.0 Released

It has been a long while since a major release of webmentions, and it is not the end of the plans we have. It is merely the first step.

In the lastest version, several useful features were added.

• Instead of an option to enable webmention support for pages, the plugin now let’s you select the option to declare support for any public post type. This means, by default, you can add support to Media(attachments)
• For outgoing webmentions, the plugin will now only send actual links, not plaintext URLs in content. It will not send webmentions for media files linked to in img tags or such unless you set this setting. Most sites don’t support receiving them directly to the file anyway.
• Avatar Support was previously handled by the Semantic Linkbacks plugin. A new implementation of this was added to this plugin and a version of Semantic Linkbacks will be released that will disable its handling if this is enabled.
• The new avatar support allows for either a URL or an attachment ID.
• For webmentions without an email address, it will serve a local anonymous avatar(a copy of the WordPress default avatar) rather than asking for one from Gravatar.
• If there is an email address, it will cache whether there is a gravatar for a defined period of time…defaultly one week and if not serve the local file as well. This reduces unneeded calls to gravatar.
• Webmention endpoint headers are now only available on URLs on the site that support them. You can disable this and show on all pages. Caching has been enabled to ensure this doesn’t slow page load.
• Misc improvements to the settings and metadata templates in the admin.

This is all part of a longer project to migrate features from Semantic Linkbacks over to Webmentions. But both plugins are several years old, and therefore it will take time to do it right. The goal is to upgrade, improve, and sometimes completely rewrite each part as it comes over, rather than merge the older code together and fix some of the issues subsequently.

The minimum PHP version for Webmentions is now PHP5.4, to accommodate the current official minimum of PHP-MF2, which will be merged in future when the microformats parsing is migrated to this plugin.