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?
@dshanske wrote a nice review about the state of IndieWeb in WordPress.
Overall, there’s been a lot of progress, and it is much simpler to set up an IndieWeb site in WordPress now than it was 1-2 years ago. Moreover, thanks largely to dshankse’s efforts, things are much more full-featured.
My main WordPress work over the past year has been Yarns Microsub Server. It’s currently in Beta and, though it has a few kinks to work out, is working well for me.
My foremost WordPress goal for this year is to add some polish to Yarns for a full release. This has three main goals:
Improve parsing, since there are some sites that Yarns/Parse-This have difficulty with
Improve admin screen. Right now, the admin UI is functional, but ugly and not very intuitive. I don’t want to invest a ton of time into design, but I think I can clean it up a bit so it’s easier to understand. The best experience would be for everything to be possible through a Microsub client, so ideally people won’t be using Yarns’ UI at all. Nonetheless, I can do better and a better interface would certainly make things easier for newcomers to Microsub.
Documentation. I’ve been thinking through the best way to explain Yarns. For someone who is new to IndieWeb and particularly to Microsub, it’s a bit confusing. I think the best option would be a three tiers of documentation to catch every type of user.
Instructions in text/screenshots, probably just as a blog post;
Video instructions – a brief demo of me adding a channel, adding a feed, and then replying to a post;
Interactive demo – Add tooltips etc. to guide people through the initial setup.
Other than that, my goals for WordPress are to improve my website as my main identity online through some visual customization and better organization, and to use Microsub and Micropub to start posting more replies and simple interactions to my site, particularly on mobile.
wrote a nice review about the state of IndieWeb in WordPress.
Overall, there’s been a lot of progress, and it is much simpler to set up an IndieWeb site in WordPress now than it was 1-2 years ago. Moreover, thanks largely to dshankse’s efforts, things… jackjamieson.net/?p=3158