WordPress/Plugins

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.

• https://wordpress.org/plugins/search/indieweb/

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:

• Install the IndieWeb Plugin for WordPress

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:

• Install the Webmention Plugin

To further enhance webmentions:

• Also install the Semantic Linkbacks plugin. This adds support for richer comments (including the likes, reposts, favorites, RSVPs and classic mentions.

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:

• Syndication Links plugin
  • Uses Bridgy publish functionality
    • Micropub or
    • via Webmention
      • Requires proper microformats (aka mf2) in one's theme, see

Helpful information about formatting for control of POSSE output

• • • See also: WordPress with Bridgy
  • POSSE destinations include Twitter, Flickr, GitHub, Reddit, Mastodon, micro.blog, and Pinboard
  • Configurable for custom syndication endpoints including Indieweb.xyz and IndieNews
  • Works with Micropub clients (like Quill) that support syndication targets.

• 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

• Quickposse
  • POSSE destinations include Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram
  • Ashton McAllan is selfdogfooding this plugin

• IFTTT (If This, Then That)
  • Scott Kingery has documented some of how he uses IFTTT.

• Bridgy publish (deprecated; recommend Syndication Links instead)

Single silo plugins

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

• Tumblr Crosspostr (Tumblr only, supports rel-syndication)
• Diasposter (Diaspora* only, supports rel-syndication)
• WP-Crosspost (WordPress-to-WordPress only, supports rel-syndication)

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

• Keyring Social Importers - an impressive importer with auto-import functionality and with an easily extendable setup on top of the Keyring plugin. Currently supported networks:
  • Delicious
  • Flickr
  • Foursquare
  • Instagram
  • Instapaper
  • TripIt
  • Twitter
  • ... and anything you can build on top of this and the Keyring plugin, for example, 500px is added as a service to Keyring in a github repository.
• DsgnWrks Instagram Importer - for Instagram
• DsgnWrks Twitter Importer - for Twitter
• Ozh' Tweet Archiver - for Twitter (Separately available on GitHub with scripts .csv JSON for importing more than 3200 Tweets imposed by Twitter API; it also has a custom "Twitter" theme available; for additional support and instructions see these two blogposts: 1 2
• FeedWordPress allows one to use RSS feeds of sites to import content and display it on a WordPress site giving attribution to the original piece of content. Used in this way, it could be considered a "poor man's PESOS."
• Integromat appears to be a PESOS service, similar to IFTTT, that can be used with WordPress

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

• PressForward a relatively full featured reader that is also useful for archiving and reposting
• blogrol2email - a combined RSS and microformats reader that uses the (slightly forgotten and abandoned) Blogroll section of WordPress as source and PHP Mf2 parser from User:Waterpigs.co.uk.
• Whisperfollow for feed aggregation
• FeedWordPress or see also
• WPMUDEV Reader (requires subscription, meant for WP multi-site use)

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.

• URL Shortener: WP-Hum
• Simple Location - adds location, venue, and optionally weather support to WordPress posts.
• WordPress uf2
• Aperture - signs you up with an account on Aperture automatically, so that you can use Microsub apps
• Tempus Fugit - adds On This Day, This Week, ordinal dates, week, and other time related tweaks to WordPress
• WebActions
• blavatars (icons)
• IndieWeb reply, repost, like, and RSVP bookmarklets, requires the Press This plugin
• IndieNews Plugin for submitting content to IndieNews
• sg-bookmarks - a custom plugin for creating bookmarks in WordPress. additional details

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

• BrowserID/Persona
• PubSubHubbub
• Hashtags
• Custom feed URL
• ActivityStreams
• Pushpad web push notifications
• People & Places-related to Keyring Social Importer
• Keyring Social Importers (beta) 1
• Moodkind for tracking mood in conjunction with Post Kinds

Past or old tech plugins

• OpenID
• OStatus
• Salmon

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.

See Also

• ...