Matthias Pfefferle (@pfefferle), Automattic’s Open Web Lead, explained his Project “Enable Mastodon Apps for WordPress and its Plugins” for the CloudFest Hackathon.
Transcript (auto generated)
Simon:
What’s your project called and what is it all about?
Matthias:
The project is called Enable Mastodon Apps. And the idea is to bring the Mastodon API to WordPress.
And the bigger idea behind all of that is WordPress is not known for its possibilities to have social interaction and to haveeasy ways to publish posts in a modern way.
Kind of like microblogging, short content, some images, focus on images, no titles, hashtags.
So we thought it might be a good idea to have a possibility to reuse some of the more modern publishing apps.
And the most open and most used app in decentralized communication movement is Mastodon.
So we decided to start with that to profit from the big app community so far.
Simon:
I know that you’re working on the ActivityPop integration for WordPress.
Is this something you can only use in combination with that?
Or could I also use Mastodon apps to publish posts on my WordPress site without federating the blog?
Matthias:
The idea was to decouple both plugins.
They work work nicely together but you could use either or so if you simply install the plugin you see all your posts in themainstream and you can publish new content you can also search and view by hashtags to see older posts or find olderposts of you you could also comment that if that makes sense yeah if you have a bigger blog with some of some of yourfriends and or your family it’s kind kind of small social social network, you could have an easy access with the with theplugin.
And one of the biggest goals of the hackathon project was to make it as extensible as possible so that also other pluginscould hook into the EnableMathodonApps plugin and provide their information or hook into some actions from the app.
Simon:
What’s the final result you want to leave the hackathon with?
Matthias:
The final result would be to make the current implementation solid and working and fixing some of the latest bugs.
And in the best case, we would try to have some example implementation of other plugins, like, for example, a big RSS reader to have the RSS feed as kind of a timeline, social network replacement thing.
So that you could see your subscriptions from WordPress in the Messelein app, for example.
Like similar to if you follow someone on the fediverse um yeah.
Simon:
I’m very much looking forward to that i guess i will be user number one after this hackathon for the very site this this interview is going to be published at i think that about covers it right so yeah i would say so thank you for taking the time thanks.