Bringing some plugin and custom functionality closer to wp core, to more easily post using the ActivityPub API.
Post Formats are back
For the last few years I’d been using Jan Boddez excellent Indie Blocks plugin.
My favourite features were the reply block and the note post type, which I was using to post notes and replies from my blog to the Fediverse. These features were compatible with the ActivityPub plugin before it began supporting them natively.
The ActivityPub plugin has had a reply block for a while now, and with its Post Content template editor being phased out in favour of using Post Formats, I had been planning to migrate.
The migration
I installed the Post Formats for Block Themes plugin to help. The plugin brings the Format selector back to the Editor and also brings post formats as a filter to the Query block.
The Migration consisted of the Post Type switcher plugin, and bulk editing the old Notes type to the standard Post type. Once the posts were migrated I could again use the bulk editor to apply the correct Status format!
One thing I was worried about was spamming followers and anyone who had interacted with these posts over the fedi getting notified of the update. Luckily the Bulk post editing bypasses the post save hook. The only way I was able to trigger a notification on mastodon was by revisiting one of these old posts. Mastodon refetched the post and detected the updated date.
The result
So I’m able to keep my blog layout with Articles in the main section and keep Status and other formats in the Notes section of the sidebar.
A few hours testing and tweaking, with a final result of everything looking the same doesn’t seem like a great idea, you might think…
So the real reason is to facilitate posting from the app I’m building (dog fooding). Since my micro-blogging archive was using the old post format, and the new posts were using the new setup (Status post format), I figured it was time.
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