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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.

Liked https://tantek.com/2019/306/t1/thank-you-wordcampus-take-back-your-web by Tantek ÇelikTantek Çelik (tantek.com)

Thank you @WordCampUS and thanks @photomatt for the invitation to speak on “Take Back Your Web”! Huge thanks to @dshanske for all his help!

Great questions & seeing so many with their own sites. Follow @dshanske’s awesome posts and progress on his own site e.g. https://da…

Indieweb Thoughts Post State of the Word

It has been a while since I wrote out some thoughts on where the Indieweb is on WordPress. Sitting here, after hearing Matt Mullenweg gave the State of the Word at WordCamp US, and after I assisting Tantek Çelik in his talk on Taking Back the Web, which was one of the contributing factors to my being at WordCamp US.

I joined the Indieweb community in 2014, and I feel after 5 years of work, things started to come together. We have a robust collection of plugins and opportunities. But over the coming months, there are some long term goals that need to be achieved.

  • The WordPress Block Editor – It is, whether I like it or not, the editor for WordPress is now Gutenberg. The Indieweb plugins currently avoid that reality. I made an effort to make sure that several of them would work with Gutenberg, despite not being Gutenberg ready, but I will have to bite the bullet and learn how to think in blocks.
  • The Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugin merge – This has been a slow process. It is holding up or delaying further iteration on the feature set…including things such as improved display.
  • IndieAuth – Improving and hardening the security of the IndieAuth plugin to prepare for AutoAuth and private post support. This requires some additional refactoring.
  • Indieweb Site Health Checker in the Indieweb Plugin – This would parse a site and check its MF2, similar to indiewebify.me

There are obviously other things I’d like to do…improve Micropub for one. but the above are the ones that I think would push things forward the most.