WordPress plugins | Chris Aldrich

Liked a post by

David Shanske (david.shanske.com)

Micropub 2.2.3 for WordPress has been released. It fixes a variety of warning notices. Published, updated, name, and summary properties are no longer stored in post meta. When queried, they will be pulled from the equivalent WordPress properties. Content should be as well, however as content in th...

Hooray!

Bookmarked WordPress Theme Components (WP Theme Components)

Theme components are bite sized code snippets that can be reused across multiple themes, but are either too small or don’t make sense to be released as a plugin. Stop cluttering up your functions.php file and start using theme components! Who are theme components for? Th...

This looks interesting and useful. Perhaps a potential solution for adding small tidbits of microformats mark up to one’s theme at a more granular level than the mf2 plugin? I can see use cases for other snippets too like accepting Webmentions automatically, etc.

Read IndieAuth 3.5.0 for WordPress Released by

David Shanske (david.shanske.com)

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 de...

Read Micropub 2.2.0 for WordPress Released by

David Shanske (david.shanske.com)

Micropub 2.2.0 has one major change in it. IndieAuth client code was removed. This code now lives in the IndieAuth plugin. This means that Micropub does not check for scopes. It uses the built-in WordPress capability system to determine if an action should be performed. The IndieAuth plugin limits c...

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WordPress can use this new standard with the Webmention plugin. (Surprise!) I also highly recommend the Semantic Linkbacks plugin which upgrades the presentation of these notifications (like Trackback, Pingback, or Webmention) to more user-friendly display so they appear in comments sections much like they do in corporate social media as comments, reposts, likes, and favorites, detected using microformats2 markup from the source of the linkback.

Liked Planning out the Next Generation of Post Kinds by

David Shanske (david.shanske.com)

I’ve been working on the Post Kinds plugin for several years now. It allows the enhancement of WordPress posts into the Indieweb types of posts. But in the current environment, the question I keep getting asked is: When will it support Gutenberg, the WordPress block editor? This is something of a ...

I’m thinking about this. Will try some diagrams first…

Read Posts with Read Status via PESOS using GoodReads and Micropub

Today I accidentally realized that both the WordPress Micropub server and the Post Kinds plugin support read-status values of “to-read”, “reading”, and “finished”. I’ve managed to tweak my PESOS work flow with Goodreads.com to also include these experimental pieces using the following additional snippets of code appended to the “Body” fields I’ve described before:

&read-status=to-read
&read-status=reading
&read-status=finished

I’ve added one of the three snippets to the appropriate IFTTT.com recipes for Goodreads feeds to create the appropriate output. Here’s the first post I’ve made using the new recipe for bookmarking a book I’d like to read: https://boffosocko.com/2020/02/15/meditations-marcus-aurelius/.

Previously I’ve been using simple notes to create read posts for books and just adding a “read” category to give me more control over the data in the posts. (I only used read posts previously for online articles.) Now that I’ve got the ability to provide some better differentiation for my progress, I think I’ll switch to using read posts for all my reading (books and articles).

Incidentally following IndieBookClub.biz and Indigenous for Android which added support for these earlier today, my method may be the third to use these microformats in the wild. Thanks to gRegor Morrill, Kristof De Jaeger, David Shanske, Ryan Barrett, and Charlotte Allen for their prior work, experimentation, code, and examples for allowing me to get this working on my website.

Replied to Feed WordPress 101: Feeding The Machine by

Alan Levine (CogDogBlog)

If you are just syndicating a few feeds into your own site, or maybe for a single class of students, it’s not much work to manually add the feeds. Collecting them can be as simple as asking students to email you the address for their blog, or collecting them via something like a Google Form. Many of us dream of a single one button solution, but my experience in creating at least half a dozen of these sites are is… feeds can be messy.

Alan, this series is great. Coincidentally I came across it courtesy of Greg McVerry (#) after having spent some time over the past few days discussing feed discovery with David Shanske who recently wrote a small WordPress plugin for helping to uncover RSS feeds for tags and categories. Today he wrote some broader thoughts about feed discovery you may appreciate.

In addition to all of this, since you’re a coder, you might also appreciate some of the more advanced feed discovery code David has written into the Yarns Microsub Server for WordPress (code on Github). You may be able to build some of the discovery bits into some of your syndication hubs/planets in the future.

Of course, like FeedWordPress and the relatively similar PressForward plugin, you might also be able to bend Yarns into an aggregator in similar ways.

Extra Feeds Plugin for WordPress

David Shanske has built a simple new IndieWeb friendly plugin for WordPress.

For individual posts, the Extra Feeds plugin will add code into the <header> of one’s page to provide feed readers that have built-in discovery mechanisms the ability to find the additional feeds provided by WordPress for all the tags, categories, and other custom taxonomies that appear on any given page.

Without the plugin, WordPress core will generally only provide the main feed for your site and that of your comments feed. This is fine for sites that only post a few times a day or even per week. If you’re owning more of the content you post online on your own website as part of the IndieWeb or Domain of One’s Own movements, you’ll likely want more control for the benefit of your readers.

In reality WordPress provides feeds for every tag, category, or custom taxonomy that appears on your site, it just doesn’t advertise them to feed readers or other machines unless you add them manually or via custom code or a plugin. Having this as an option can be helpful when you’re publishing dozens of posts a day and your potential readers may only want a subsection of your posting output.

In my case I have a handful of taxonomies that post hundreds to thousands of items per year, so it’s more likely someone may want a subsection of my content rather than my firehose. In fact, I just ran across a statistician yesterday who was following just my math and information theory/biology related posts. With over 7,000 individual taxonomy entries on my site you’ve got a lot of choice, so happy hunting and reading!

This plugin also includes feeds for Post Formats, Post Kinds (if you have that plugin installed), and the author feed for sites with one or more different authors.

This is useful in that now while you’re on any particular page and want to subscribe to something on that specific page, it will be much easier to find those feeds, which have always been there, but are just not easily uncovered by many feed reader work flows because they weren’t explicitly declared.

Some examples from a recent listen post on my site now let you more easily find and subscribe to:

my faux-cast:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » listen Kind Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/feed/rss/" />
the feed of items tagged with Econ Extra Credit, which I’m using to track my progress in Marketplace’s virtual book club:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » Econ Extra Credit Tag Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/tag/econ-extra-credit/feed/rss/" />
the feed for all posts by an author:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich » Posts by Chris Aldrich Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/author/chrisaldrich/feed/rss/" />