Feature Request: Map WordPress post type to Activity Type

[DeadSuperHero]

What

Publications and blogs can make extensive use of different WordPress types: images, videos, podcasts, reviews, articles, and more. The problem is that the current ActivityPub plugin makes a big assumption that a blog's admin wants all of their stuff to appear as a singular uniform type to Fediverse Actors, even when specific WordPress types might be suited to something else.

We humbly request an extension of the existing customization feature to be applicable on a per-Wordpress-post-type basis.

Why

One struggle that we've had with the WordPress-ActivityPub plugin is that it currently takes an "all or nothing" approach for a blog.

We Distribute has multiple types of WordPress posts:

• Long-form Articles
• Podcast Episodes
• Newsletters

We're also looking at adopting short-form posts for quick news updates.

Here's the problem: all of these will only be rendered as one uniform Activity type. If we choose Article, even short-form content will be unreadable from platforms such as Mastodon. If we choose Note, that might cause problems for platforms specifically designed to post and read Article activities.

It would be incredibly useful to extend the existing customization options for federation to be applied on a per-Wordpress-post-type basis.

How

The plugin could check to see which post types are currently enabled on a WordPress site, then provide customization options for what Activity type is used, and how the template is customized.

This would allow content coming out of WordPress look more native to Fediverse platforms supporting particular types. From a UX perspective, maybe the Customization section would represent different tabs for each WordPress post type, and users could decide which activity type should be mapped.

[pfefferle]

Thanks for filing that issue! I am totally with you and already prepared a PR for that, I am curious about your feedback: https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/pull/661

[DeadSuperHero]

Wow! 🤯 I guess we're on the same page about this.

[DeadSuperHero]

I just wanted to follow up on this, as it's something I'm still thinking about. I see that you have improved the defaults in your PR - which is good! That is definitely a great improvement.

One thing that I have been thinking about for We Distribute, is the idea of mapping different WordPress Post Types to different ActivityPub vocabulary representations.

Here are the WordPress Post Types we currently support:

• Post - all of our articles
• Note - Basically short-form content, could pretty much be used as Mastodon-like statuses.
• Episode - Basically, an episode of our podcast

It would be really cool to be able to use something like this dialog:

On individual WordPress Post Types. So, it could be something like this:

• Post - WordPress Post-Format
• Note - It's actually just Note! We think it would be interesting to have Mastodon-like posts for short pieces of breaking news.
• Episode - Note with an excerpt and one audio attachment

I realize I might be asking a lot, but being able to do this for better compatibility with the network would be great for our site.

[pfefferle]

I realize I might be asking a lot, but being able to do this for better compatibility with the network would be great for our site.

I like that you ask a lot, that means you care! 🫶

The current code uses Article as default and sets Note if it is of the type: 'aside', 'status', 'quote', 'note', 'gallery', 'image', 'video' or 'audio', it changes to Note.

So if I change it so that "Note" is the default and that "Article" is set specifically for articles only, it might work like you proposed?

I think I like the idea, because as Note is handled the best, every unknown WordPress content should us that as default!

Thanks for your feedback!

[DeadSuperHero]

I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea! That should work for most use-cases.