notes

notes, 2 months ago to random

Hackathon Project: Enable Mastodon Apps for WordPress and its Plugins

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.

#CFhack2024 #CloudFest

notes, 2 months ago to random

Hackathon Project: WordPress Tools for Hosting Providers

Javier Casares (@javiercasares) one of the team reps of the WordPress hosting team, introduced us to his project “WordPress Tools for Hosting Providers” at the CloudFest Hackathon.

Transcript (auto generated)

Simon:
What is your project called, and what is it all about?

Javier: I don’t remember the name. Yeah, no, no, no.
No, it’s a WordPress hosting tool for hosting providers because the main thing is almost half of the internet uses WordPress, so we need to test the future versions of WordPress.
So the hosting team has some tools that checks every commit, So every change that is made in the future code is going to be tested in the most possible hosting companies can reach.
So we have a tool that hosting companies uses to run those tests.
And we can check if all the changes in the code works on all the hosting companies as possible.

Simon:
But that’s a tool that’s already existing, right?

Javier:
Yeah, that was a tool that existed for six years, but has been there for a long time.
And nobody paid a lot of attention.
So in the last six months, I’ve been trying to understand the tool because it wasn’t build by me.
And then we detected some things that we can improve. For example, a lot of hosting companies offer different PHP versions.
So we need to check the same WordPress code in different PHP versions.
And that was something that it wasn’t in the tool. So that’s something we just added.
And then for example, another thing is hosting companies offer different types of services.
For example, the shared hosting, the VPS, the cloud.
Whatever they are using. So another thing we are going to try, this is what we are doing now, is to have like a multi-environment reporting.
So the idea is to go from one test, one report to a multi-exponential reporting.

Simon:
So more like a matrix of different tests to run at a hosting company.

Javier:
Yeah. So for example, the developers, developers, will see how the WordPress software works in a lot of combinations and in a lot of possible versions and everything.
So that’s the main goal we are working on right now.
We have some ideas in mind to improve in the future, but that’s something the hosting companies and the developers mainly, were asking us for four years, maybe.
And we didn’t have the time or the resources to do it.
And that’s when CloudFest, like six months ago, when they asked me, OK, you have a project in mind?
It was like, OK, I think we can have a lot of hackers working on this because that’s something they asked to do and to improve.
Proof, and right now, we have half of the code, and I think we are going to have everything that we have in mind at the end, so yeah, it’s very, very cool.

Simon:
Cool. One final question.
What’s in it for me as a hosting company to run these tests?
Because it’s nice for WordPress, I get that. But what’s in it for the hosting companies?

Javier:
For the hosting companies, you will get a report with its pass.
So everything is fine. But you can get a report that something is not working.
So you will get some information about what’s happening, that your configuration fails or has any problem.
And you can ask the host WordPress community that, okay, we have this error.
Maybe we detected that, okay, it’s something that we need to improve or some version or whatever.
Or maybe it’s something that our system is not compatible with WordPress.
So maybe we need to improve WordPress to be compatible with this error.
So it’s like a win-win for everybody because it’s a win for developers.
So they can see that WordPress works in all the environments.
And for hosting companies, it’s a win because you can check months before a new release that that release will work in your hosting company.
So you can offer the best service to your clients.

Simon:
Thank you.

Javier:
Okay, you’re welcome.

#CFhack2024 #CloudFest