Add Webmention Support

October 20, 2018 · 15:58 ·

David Shanske

Description

Webmention is a modern reimplementation of things like Pingbacks and Trackbacks. This proposal would be to remove the older standards in favor of the new.

The old standards were abandoned because of abuse and disinterest. But the vision is valuable.

Basic premise...Site A links to site B. Site A tells Site B they've linked to it and it is up to site B to decide what to do with it after verifying it.

That can be parsing the sending site to display a rich comment (Better than WordPress currently showing an unintelligible snippet) or even merely using it in a statistic display.

There is already a plugin to support webmention and a separate one that enhances the response.

Voters

+8 more

Discussion

Pieter Bos

· October 20, 2018 · 16:05

Hi David,
Thank you for submitting your feature request.
It might be useful to add some links to your request, for example what Webmention is exactly and to the plugins you mentioned.

David Shanske

· October 20, 2018 · 16:15

https://webmention.net/

David Shanske

· October 20, 2018 · 16:17

https://wordpress.org/plugins/webmention/

https://wordpress.org/plugins/semantic-linkbacks/

James Nylen

· October 25, 2018 · 03:58

I think this could enable a really large number of interesting applications, and is totally in the spirit of our planned focus on providing stable APIs for people to build on.

One example is the p2 theme that is used heavily inside Automattic and at WordPress.org for any kind of discussion that needs to last longer than a chat conversation. It supports @mentions for users, but this support is quite hacky and sometimes simply doesn't work. No one has fixed this due to the complexity of the code involved.

More info about p2: https://p2theme.com/, https://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/