IndieAuth 3.5.0 for WordPress Released

Earlier in the week, I noted the release of IndieAuth 3.5.0, but I didn’t explain the major under the hood changes that occurred here in a post, which I need to do as at least one person is experiencing issues(probably necessitating a 3.5.1 as soon as I figure out why.)

I also noted I forgot to describe this clearly in the readme, if people read changelogs and will have to correct that as well.  I wrote some of this code in January and it was merged, but didn’t release it till July, so…

IndieAuth 3.5.0 implements scope support. Previously, scopes were handled by the Micropub plugin. It would check what scopes you had and implement accordingly. But WordPress does not have the concept of scopes. It has the concept of capabilities. And users have roles, which are collections of capabilities.

So Indieauth 3.5.0 implements scopes also as collections of capabilities. If you are doing a capability check in WordPress, and the request was authenticated with an IndieAuth token specifically, it will filter your capabilities by the ones defined in the scopes the token has.

That means if your user didn’t have the capability to begin with, you can’t use it. In a future version, I’ve considered on the authorization screen, not even issuing a token with that scope, but this is ultimately more secure than before.

It means that plugins don’t have to understand scope at all. They just have to enforce and support native WordPress capabilities, which they should anyway.

For now, the system only supports built-in capabilities, but there is nothing that says it cannot move to custom capabilities as needed, as everything is filterable and we accept pull requests.

The second big change I did mention in the changelog brings the code to support using a remote IndieAuth endpoint back into this code. However, it is disabled by default. This is based on the code removed from Micropub, which had a parallel IndieAuth class that was only used when the IndieAuth plugin was not enabled. By having it here, it allows anyone who wants to use it to enable it, but simplifies the experience for the bulk of users. It also allows it to be enhanced by any of the scope or other enhancements put into the main plugin.

The plugin also simplifies the site checks to ensure that your site will work with the plugin, putting them into the Site Health checks where they logically belong. This includes an SSL check and a Authorization header check.