Getting started

What has been done so far

As we have announced from the very beginning, it is important to us to make our work as sustainable as possible. In this context, sustainability means being modular and trying to enable necessary extension functionality in the upstream project, the WordPress ActivityPub plugin. Regarding the functionality that our project should ideally offer, we have created two posts in the discussion section of the repository on Github to provide a place where these feature additions can be discussed by the community while we work on a draft for a pull request.

• Flexible management of how posts gets transformed to ActivityPub objects
• Management of ActivityPub actors

During the planning stage of our proposals, we had fantastic meetings with other ActivityPub developers, whom we would like to sincerely thank.

• The lead developer of the ActivityPub plugin @pfefferle provided a fascinating insight into previous and ongoing challenges, as well as future strategies, eagerly embracing our concepts with receptiveness.
• The lead developer of Mobilizon @tcit informed us about the most important hurdles in the development of Mobilizon and helped us to assess what challenges in interoperability we were likely to face.
• With @grindhold, the developer of flohmarkt, a federated marketplace with ActivityPub support, we discussed common issues such as working with non-note object types, implementing instance/application actors, and took a look at some Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (#FEP) that are of interest to both our projects.

A later task in our project plan is testing with real users to identify typical pitfalls in setup, use and documentation. Although this user study will not take place in the near future, we have recognised the need to start thinking about it now and have already had discussions about planning this task.

Current tasks

Currently we are designing and prototyping the architecture of the hook system, how plugins can register their own ActivityPub transformers to the main plugin.

Upcoming tasks

Next, we will write a small WordPress plugin containing hardcoded transformer classes for the three most installed WordPress event plugins, as well as extending and improving the admin interface for managing transformers.