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Over the last months, one of the regular problems mentioned with the Indieweb on WordPress is the lack of compatible themes. Most themes do not properly mark up their content in microformats, or support some of the customizations that would integrate with Indieweb plugins.

I had already been working on my fork of the WordPress stock Twenty-Sixteen theme, called IW26. In my changing of the theme, I tried to limit being opinionated to the markup and plugin integration and leave the design to be mostly unchanged. On the backend, update the theme with any improvements to WordPress core and backdate any improvements made to _s, the starter theme that many WordPress themes are based on.

Independent Publisher is a popular theme that began adding microformats and Indieweb support. I had contributed to the theme. But development seems to be over and I haven’t gotten a response from the developer.

So, after much consideration, I decided to fork the theme. The Indieweb version, called Indieweb Publisher, strips out many of the specialty features the original theme had.  It is still an evolving work, but it is good enough for daily use.

What was removed:

• Excerpt Options – Switched to only the decision as to whether to have an excerpt on front/archive pages. The type of excerpt to generate seems to me to be strictly plugin territory.
• Multi-Author Mode – This was replaced with the Indieweb plugin’s setting for whether a site is a single or multi-author site.
• Social icons menu – Again, seems like plugin territory to me.
• Custom header used as a logo

What was added

• Basic support for the Syndication Links, Simple Location, and Post Kinds plugins.
• Option to show time on posts, not just date
• Option to hide category display.
• Custom logo feature to replace adaptive use of custom header
• Genericons Neue replaced Genericons font set
• Privacy Policy link if enabled in WordPress
• Archive title and description functions and filters replaced custom coded functions
• H-Card template page that can be used as front page
• Set rel-feed if front page is not feed.
• Footer widget
• Switch to SASS for CSS generation
• Replaced custom navigation with navigation from core implemented in WordPress 4.1
• Started removing styling on microformats classes

Still being worked on is importing the Independent Publisher 2 layout that appears on WordPress.com and letting this be an alternate layout option, as well as taking full advantage of SASS file generation to remove duplication. I actually like the look of IP2 as well.

So, give it a try, give feedback and suggestions, and I’ll continue to iterate on both themes. You can download it from Github in a zip file and upload it to your site.

Someday, it may be worthy of an upload to the wordpress.org repo

I spent some time in the last few days watching the second season of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I’ve always enjoyed period pieces, especially 20th century ones. This is set in 1959.

I can’t pretend I was a Jew in New York in the 1950s…my parents were though, although certainly not the economic level of the characters in the show. There are things I question. I’m sure I’m not the only member of an ethnicity who thinks that they did not quite get my culture right.

In the second season, the title character and her family go to Steiner’s Mountain Resort in the Catskills. The actual scene was filmed at Scott’s Oquaga Lake House in Deposit, NY. I’ve been through Deposit, although not familiar with this place.

Summers like the one pictured on the show were common, as the city was hot, air conditioning wasn’t really a thing, and flying was a much more costly affair than it is today. There were hundreds of Jewish resorts in Sullivan, Orange, and Ulster Counties.

The Concord Hotel, a setting on the show, and apparently close to where Steiner’s is supposed to be, is a place that I am familiar with, having been a guest there as a kid. I remember spending time at the Stevensville Hotel, and when it closed, the Brown’s Hotel, and only recall one time at the Concord. I also spent time at Kutscher’s.

The show tries to recapture the idea of it. By the 80s and 90s when I experienced these hotels, it was a very different time, but the things featured on the show brought back some memories. By today, that part of history is all gone. I still go up to Sullivan County, and I’ve driven or walked past the remnants of old Catskills resorts.

I would have liked to experience it in its heyday.

Every year, at the Indieweb Summit, we have the State of the Indieweb(it’s the year of the Reader, by the way). The head of the WordPress project gives his State of the Word. I even watched the Governor of my State give his State of the state.

As I go through my 2018 Year in Review, I wanted to cover the State of WordPress as it relates to the Indieweb, cover where we are and were I hope we are going.

While the Block Based Editor, aka Gutenberg, had no direct effect on WordPress and its Indieweb usage, it has had a serious effect on developing for WordPress and will continue to do so in the future.

We’ve had several community members who have opted to move off of WordPress. But we continue to, because of the market presence of the product, attract new people. So, concerns aside about the future of the WordPress project, it makes sense for the community to continue to evolve.

•  IndieAuth Endpoint for WordPress
• Micropub Endpoint Rewritten to use WordPress REST API
• Weather for Simple Location
• New Weather, Location, and Map Providers for Simple Location
• Refbacks
• Parse This, a post-processing and parsing library for WordPress split out and updated, now set to be used in a Microsub server
• Yarns Microsub in beta
• Support for syndication built into Syndication Links
• Redesign of the UIs for Simple Location and Post Kinds
• New code to allow the registration of custom post kinds
• Attempt to store microformats in mf2 json and convert to jf2
• New Widgets
• Basic support for receiving Vouches added to Webmentions…though disabled by default
• Template improvements to Semantic Linkbacks to improve the settings page and new property support
• Additional Microformats 2/Indieweb Plugin friendly themes.

This is only a short list of things that came to mind when I read through the various changelogs.

All of these items reflect the coming together and polishing of a complete Indieweb experience. As we move into the end of the first month of 2019, here is what I personally am hoping to see.

• The release of Yarns Microsub
• At least one of the two theme conversions I worked on being released in the WordPress Theme Directory, giving us another option for individuals who better integration
• Redesign, improvement, and enhancement of the Facepiles in Semantic Linkbacks.
• Look at the future of Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks. Every year, there is talk of why they aren’t merged. This is partly to do with the storage design. It may be time to standardize the storage.
• Improve MF2 Feed to generate a compliant feed for times when the theme cannot be modified to encourage more interaction
• Improve documentation

While I’m not hoping for it, in the longterm, whether or not we should pivot to accept a block editor world for the Indieweb plugins is a matter for debate.

The alternative is to leave the block editor for article posting and add a UI into Post Kinds to allow for simple note and like posting in the admin. Or use Micropub exclusively.

But, we will all continue to plug along. What are you looking to get out of having a WordPress site and adopting the principles of the Indieweb community this year?