Conversation

When is the right time to release version 1.0.0? – If I had waited until every interoperability issue was resolved, probably never.

However, the main goal of this plugin is now realized: enhancing the WordPress ActivityPub plugin to support third-party integrations – specifically, ensuring that events from popular WordPress event plugins can be shared and discovered across the Fediverse (Release on Codeberg.org). Checkout this Gancio demo site, where you can see events sourced from a WordPress site in action!

A special thanks to the team at Radically Open Security (@ros) for their security review. My correspondence with the pentester Marcus Bointon (@Synchro) was not only professional but also fun and incredibly insightful – I learned far more than I could have imagined.

I’m also grateful to Matthias Pfefferle (@pfefferle) and the other developers of the WordPress ActivityPub plugin. Collaborating with them to make the plugin more adaptable for third-party use has been a rewarding experience.

A huge shoutout to @lesion for his contributions to FEP-8a8e, his insightful ideas, valuable discussions, and his incredibly quick implementations of all kinds of suggestions and bug reports in Gancio.

Most importantly, a huge thank you to NLnet (@nlnet) and NGI Zero (@NGIZero). Without their support, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to develop this piece of software.

• Support more Event Plugins: Added support for the EventPrime and EventON event plugins.
• Event Self-Announce: Automatically announces events at a configurable time before they start as reminders.
• Blueprint Preview: Try out the plugin in the WordPress Playground.
• Event Sources: Fetch, cache, and display events from remote ActivityPub profiles.
• Custom ActivityPub Preview: Improved visibility of how events appear in the Fediverse.
• Admin Setting for Plain Text Summaries: Option to enforce plain-text event summaries.
• Updated Dependencies: Now requires ActivityPub plugin version 5.1.0 or higher.
• Bug Fixes & Admin UI Improvements: dozens of small fixes and refinements.

Despite this milestone, some interoperability issues remain. To point out a few:

• Mastodon: Currently, Mastodon does not handle updates for Event objects. Issue #31114
• Mobilizon’s customized ActivityPub dialect: Mobilizon was developed with the focus on federating with other Mobilizon instances. It is likely to reject everything it does not understand. Issue #1669.
• Content warning & event summaries: Mastodon uses the summary property of ActivityPub for object types it doesn’t support natively. At the same time repurposed the summary property of ActivityPub together with the additional flag sensitive for content warnings. Thanks to the developers of Sharkey for the interesting discussions on this.
• Instance following: Using FEP-2667 for to find an appropriate relay actor turned out not to be a good generic approach. While it works for Gancio or Mobilizon, a more complex system like WordPress has to fulfill more needs.
• A common basis for using the Event object in ActivityPub: Finish FEP-8a8e and bring it to life.
• Upstream ActivityPub plugin: The recent version 5.0.0 brought many improvements but also two critical bugs which limit what our plugin can do. Issue #1245 and #1269.

I hope that this release will be a significant step towards making events part of the Fediverse event ecosystem, and I’m excited to see how it develops! While I have new features and concrete improvements in mind, I’m most excited to hear feedback from users and see it in action.