WordPress/Plugins

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The WordPress.org repository has over 30,000 plugins. There are more outside of the official repository. While not all plugins are expressly designed for Indieweb, some can be used regardless with little to no adjustment.

WordPress Plugins are recommended plugins that can help make your site more IndieWeb friendly.

Common Plugins Summary

Name/ Wiki Page Logo Short Description Install & feedback Developer(s)
IndieWeb Plugin Adds rel-me and h-card to your user profile; bundled installer for core IndieWeb plugins. WordPress install

GitHub (issues)

 Matthias Pfefferle, David Shanske, WordPress Outreach Club
Webmention Adds Webmention sending support so you can use your blog to reply to posts on other blogs! WordPress install

GitHub(issues)

 Matthias Pfefferle
Micropub Adds Micropub support to your blog, so you can use any Micropub client to post. WordPress install

GitHub(issues)

Ryan Barrett, David Shanske
Syndication Links Adds links to syndicated copies of your posts. Supports u-syndication markup. Adds basic syndication support. WordPress install

GitHub(issues)

David Shanske
IndieAuth Allows you to log into other sites using IndieAuth, 100% self-hosted. WordPress install

GitHub(issues)

David Shanske,  Matthias Pfefferle, Aaron Parecki
WebSub Adds WebSub support to your site...simple way to let people know in real-time when your blog is updated. WordPress install

GitHub(issues)

 Matthias Pfefferle
Post Kinds Respond to and interact with other sites using IndieWeb standards for different types of posts. WordPress install

GitHub(issues)

David Shanske

WordPress Directory IndieWeb Plugins

The WordPress Plugin Directory has several IndieWeb plugins.

In general, if a plugin has been updated within the past two years, it should be compatible with the latest version of WordPress. If a plugin older than two years, it should be avoided.

Start with:

This plugin helps you establish your IndieWeb identity by extending the user profile to provide rel-me and h-card fields and optionally adding widgets to display an hcard on your sidebar.

The IndieWeb plugin also includes a bundled installer for a core set of IndieWeb-related plugins and a dashboard menu for settings of plugins you activate. Additional plugins on the extensions tab of the menu include: WordPress Webmention Plugin, Semantic Linkbacks, WordPress Micropub Plugin, Post Kinds Plugin, Syndication Links, WordPress IndieAuth Plugin, WordPress Microformats2 Plugin, Simple Location, and WordPress WebSub Plugins.

Plugins by feature

Plugins are categorized by the functionality they bring to the IndieWeb WordPress community

Webmention Support

Webmentions are also part of the core IndieWeb building-blocks. They let you send and receive replies, likes, etc. directly from your site.

To add webmention support to your WordPress site:

To further enhance webmentions:

alternatives

wp-webmention-again provides an async alternative webmention sender/receiver, using WP Cron for both, but it's yet to see a stable release. It also doesn't do any comment formatting.

Kinds of Posts

WordPress supports several different ways of organizing data. To support different kinds of posts, you can try the Post Kinds Plugin if you prefer the Classic WordPress editor.

The Post Kinds adds a taxonomy to the post type in Wordpress allow for posts to be classified as a reply/like/repost etc. This allows archives to be generated for these kinds of posts as well as support to add the appropriate markup.

Publishing to Your Site

Micropub for WordPress implements a Micropub server endpoint.

POSSE Plugins

Along with personal-domains, POSSE is one of the cornerstones of the IndieWeb. In short, instead of posting to social network silos, you post to your own site and then copy to the silos.

You can POSSE manually, but most people automate it. WordPress has many plugins that do this. A few of the most popular are found below.

Multi silo plugins

These plugins have the ability to target multiple silos simultaneously:

Helpful information about formatting for control of POSSE output

  • Jetpack Publicize
    • This is the simplest and easiest method, but the results are very simple and don't provide as much control over what is posted compared to other options
    • POSSE destinations include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google+, and Path
    • JetPack Premium also has a "Share it Again" feature for paid subscribers.
  • NextScripts SNAP aka SNAP
    • This has a more complicated setup and requires creating API keys for the used services, but it's both well documented with step by step instructions and allows for the most control over what is syndicated
    • POSSE destinations include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Flickr, Medium, Tumblr, and more than 20 other common social media sites

Single silo plugins

These plugins focus on POSSE to only one target silo each:

rel-syndication

If you POSSE, it's good practice to include rel-syndication links on your WordPress posts.

The Syndication Links plugin is designed to support both manual and automatic entry of rel-syndication links. It is extensible to add support for plugins and has support from Tumblr Crosspostr, Diaposter, Medium, and WP-Crosspost, as well as having integrated support courtesy of rel-syndication plugin for SNAP, Bridgy Publish, and Social.

Also, if you are writing status updates that will be duplicated in the content share boxes in your edit post screen, there is some handy code here to autofill those share fields to save copy/pasting them from the content WYSIWYG.

If you also want to go the other direction and pull your social network posts and data back to WordPress, there are PESOS plugins too. To start, try Lifestream.

PESOS Plugins

In case POSSE is not available - for example, due to API limitations like in case of Instagram - there is always the option to pull in your data from other hosts using PESOS

Authentication

In order to use your own domain name to sign into other websites, you will want to add support for IndieAuth. This requires IndieAuth for Wordpress.

The plugin also supports web sign-in, allowing you to sign into your own site using an external endpoint.

Alternatives

Install the IndieWeb plugin to add rel-me links to your WordPress site! This will allow you to login using sites that support relmeauth.

If you don't want to add a plugin, you can follow the instructions for adding social media buttons or the documentation for using text widgets. You can also add rel-me links to a custom menu by enabling the Link Relationships under Screen Options on the custom menu page.

More details for setting up rel-me links can be found at https://indieauth.com/setup.

Backfeed

Even if you're POSSEing or you're adding manual syndication urls ( for example, with Syndication Links plugin ) you probably want to pull comments and likes on the social network posts back to your site. This is called backfeed.

Some of the POSSE plugins have built-in functionality to do this for some networks.

Other options:

  • Bridgy - another option is Bridgy, a service that automatically sends webmentions for activity on your POSSEd posts inside silos (before starting to use Bridgy, make sure you first install the webmention and semantic-linkbacks plugins described below).
  • Keyring Reactions Importer - a generic, extendable plugin in early stage, on top of the Keyring plugin. It can auto-imports reactions for every post with syndicated links ( see readme of the plugin ) by polling, based on chained scheduled wp-cron events, so it may become heavy. Currently supported networks:
    • Facebook - comments & likes
    • Flickr - favorites & comments
    • 500px - likes, favorites, comments - requires an additional worker for Keyring )
    • Instagram - comments & likes
    • ... and anything you add

Reader / follower plugins

Other Indieweb Plugins

Here are a few more plugins you might want to try. Those hosted at GitHub require manual upload or other more technical setup.


Obsolete

The following plugins are deprecated/obsolete and should be uninstalled if you happen to have them:

  • "Webmentions for Comments" plugin - now part of webmention plugin. Old description: enable webmentions support for threaded comments.
  • Bridgy - Merged into Syndication Links
  • Indieweb Taxonomy - Replaced by Indieweb Post Kinds

Plugins that May Be of Interest to Indieweb Users

Past or old tech plugins

There is also an experiment to use composer as alternative to the WordPress plugin directory.

Criticisms and Planning

One of the biggest criticisms of the common WordPress plugins provided by the Indieweb community is that there are many of them and the process to configure it cumbersome.

While the community could use more WordPress developer contributors to help with that, people to file issues, to make suggestions about better descriptions for settings, people to write setup tutorials are also needed to help address this issue.

  • The Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugins are set to be merged into a single new Webmention plugin. Webmentions is the actual protocol implemenation, and Semantic Linkbacks enhances that display. They were originally built separated for that reason in 2014 but as the plurality of individuals want the enhanced displays Semantic Linkbacks offers to webmentions, the merger plan has been in progress since 2020.


WordPress
Topics Getting Started on WordPress β€’ Advanced WordPress Set Up β€’ Plugins β€’ Themes β€’ Examples β€’ WordPress with Bridgy β€’ Development β€’ Data β€’ Security
Primary Plugins Indieweb Plugin β€’ Webmention β€’ Semantic Linkbacks β€’ Micropub β€’ IndieAuth β€’ Post Kinds β€’ Syndication Links β€’ WebSub plugins
POSSE Plugins Syndication Links β€’ Social Network Auto Poster β€’ JetPack Publicize β€’ WP Crosspost β€’ Tumblr Crosspostr β€’ Diasposter β€’ Mastodon Autopost β€’ Bridgy Publish plugin (deprecated) β€’ Medium (deprecated)
PESOS Plugins Keyring Social Importers β€’ DsgnWrks Twitter Importer β€’ DsgnWrks Instagram Importer
Other Plugins IndieBlocks β€’ Shortnotes β€’ ActivityPub Plugin β€’ Aperture β€’ Refback plugin β€’ IndieWeb Press This β€’ WordPress MF2 Feeds Plugin β€’ WordPress uf2 β€’ OpenID β€’ Simple Location β€’ Parse This β€’ Indieweb Actions β€’ PressForward β€’ Yarns Indie Reader β€’ WhisperFollow β€’ blogroll2email
Themes SemPress β€’ (SemPress Child Themes: SemPress Lite, SenPress, and Index) β€’ Autonomie β€’ Independent Publisher β€’ IndieWeb Publisher β€’ mf2_s β€’ Twenty Sixteen IndieWeb-friendly fork β€’ IndieWeb Twenty Fifteen Theme β€’ Doublescores
Assistance Join the #indieweb chat β€’ IRC and other chat options β€’ WordPress FAQ β€’ WordPress Outreach Club β€’ Troubleshooting Tips β€’ WordPress tools β€’ WordPress channel
See also WordPress related wiki pages β€’ Category:WordPress plugins β€’ Category:WordPress themes β€’ Category:WordPress sessions β€’ WordPress.com β€’ WordPress using IndieMark β€’ AWS Tutorial


See Also

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