Version 1.0.0 of the ActivityPub plugin was released this week with major updates that make it possible to have a blog-wide account, instead of just individual author accounts, where followers receive updates from all authors. This new feature allows people to follow blogs on decentralized platforms like Mastodon (and many others) with replies automatically published back to the blog as comments.
In the ActivityPub plugin settings, users can check “Enable blog” to have the blog become an ActivityPub profile. Authors can be enabled at the same time as a blog-wide profile.
Activities originating from a Blog profile can be further customized through the existing post content and image settings. Users can also set the activity object type to default, article, or WordPress post format which maps the post format to the ActivityPub object type. Supported post types include posts, pages, and media. Note that the blog-wide profile only works with sites that have rewrite rules enabled.
An experimental hashtags setting is also available, which adds hashtags in the content as native tags and replaces the #tag with the tag link. Users should be aware that it may still produce HTML or CSS errors.
ActivityPub 1.0.0 introduces two new blocks – one for displaying Fediverse Followers and the other for displaying a “Follow” button to allow people to follow the blog or author on the Fediverse. The Follower system has also gotten a complete rewrite based on Custom Post Types.
Other notable updates in this release include the following:
- Signature Verification: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/spec/security/
- Simple caching
- Collection endpoints for Featured Tags and Featured Posts
- Better handling of Hashtags in mobile apps
- Update: Improved linter (PHPCS)
- Fixed: Load the plugin later in the WordPress code lifecycle to avoid errors in some requests
- Fixed: Updating posts
- Fixed: Hashtag now support CamelCase and UTF-8
Automattic acquired the plugin in March 2023 from German developer Matthias Pfefferle, who joined the company to continue improving support for federated platforms. Next on the roadmap for the ActivityPub plugin is threaded comments support and replacing shortcodes with blocks for layout.