An update on Wordpress as my Social Hub

How do you let people interact with a static website? At FOSDEM last month, Matthias Pfefferie discussed the changes to the social layer on the web. The new Social Web builds on earlier tools like RSS and PingBacks, with new tools like ActivityPub and the Fediverse.

The whole day at the Social Web devroom made it clear there is a lot to do still. And perhaps combining the reach of Wordpress with the little experience I have managing Wordpress sites (and a bit more in programming PHP) is my best bet to add a social layer to my now static main website.

So thanks to the wonderful world of LLM-assisted programming ("AI for software development"), I managed to develop a first version of a Wordpress plugin to enable social interactions on a static site.

• It's my first attempt at writing a proper plugin: with settings, admin pages, and so on.
• It works with the existing ActivityPub and Webmention plugins.
• It is still a bit of hacking to make it work with my static site.

It lets me show reactions via the Fediverse (including boosts and likes), webmentions, and local comments.

It also includes a Wordpress-based comment form as shown below: you can comment here for real.

In my case, Wordpress lives in a subdirectory of my static site. So I can check if there is a Wordpress cookie, and make it easy to add a static page to my social hub with an extra button:

That will create a custom post as a draft, so I can edit it and make an announcement out of it.

Once I publish that draft, the ActivityPub plugin will then send it out for federation.

Plenty of work left to do: fixes, getting rid of loading gravatar links by default, adding tests, publishing as a plugin, and so on. The Activitypub federation does not yet use the URL I'd like. And perhaps this can become part of the regular plugins, one day.

It is fun to work on this with a coding assistant, and explore how well that works by now!

Update 8 March: added the comment option to all my updates.