8.0.0 — Smash That Like Button
Every major version is a milestone, and 8.0.0 is no exception. Your WordPress blog just became a two-way street in the Fediverse. Visitors can like and boost your posts directly on your site. Media from federated replies is handled more reliably, and new block patterns make it easy to drop ActivityPub features into your pages.
Like and Boost, Right From Your Blog
The Fediverse Reactions block now has optional Like and Boost action buttons, inline with each reaction group. When a visitor clicks one, a modal opens where they can enter their Fediverse handle or copy the post URL to interact from their home server.
The plugin remembers the visitor’s profile in their browser, so the second time around it’s even faster. And for folks who aren’t familiar with how the Fediverse works, each modal now includes a collapsible “Why do I need to enter my profile?” help section that explains the open social web in plain language.
This dramatically lowers the friction for cross-platform engagement.
Block Patterns and Templates
Setting up a Fediverse-ready profile page used to mean manually assembling Follow Me, Extra Fields, and Followers blocks. Not anymore.
We’ve added a “Fediverse” block pattern category with four pre-configured layouts:
- Author Profile with Follow, a compact profile card.
- Fediverse Follow Page, a full-page follow experience.
- Author Header with Follow, great for author archive headers.
- Fediverse Sidebar, drop it into any sidebar or widget area.
If you’re running a block theme on WordPress 6.7+, there’s also a new Author Archive (Fediverse) block theme template ready to go.
Publish Smarter With Post Format Suggestions
A new pre-publish panel now analyzes your post content and suggests an appropriate post format when your object type is set to “Post Format.” Got a post that’s mostly images? It’ll nudge you toward the Image format. A video post? Video format.
This matters because media-focused Fediverse platforms like Pixelfed and Vernissage display Notes differently than Articles, so choosing the right format means your content looks its best everywhere it lands.
Community Snippets
We’ve added a snippets/ folder to the GitHub repository, a home for lightweight, community-contributed extensions that don’t belong in the core plugin but are too useful to lose. The first batch includes:
- FediBlog Tag, automatically adds
#FediBlogto standard blog posts for better Fediverse discovery. - Locale from Tags, derives post locale from taxonomy tags.
- Bot Account, marks your profile as automated and displays a “BOT” badge in the Fediverse.
- Blockless ActivityPub, renders Fediverse reactions as pure server-side HTML, no JS required.
- Photon CDN, serves cached remote media through Jetpack’s Photon CDN for faster delivery.
Got a snippet of your own? Check out the snippets folder and send a PR.
Smarter Media Caching
Under the hood, we’ve rebuilt how the plugin handles remote media, avatars, emoji, images, audio, and video from across the Fediverse. Instead of importing everything into the WordPress Media Library at insert time, media is now wrapped in custom blocks and cached lazily at render time.
What does that mean for you? Faster processing of incoming content, less disk usage, and better rendering of audio and video attachments. Original remote URLs are preserved in block attributes, so caches can be regenerated without data loss. If you’re using Jetpack’s Site Accelerator, that works too, the new system is built filter-first.
For site admins, there are new CLI commands to keep things tidy:
<div>wp activitypub cache status</div><div>wp activitypub cache clear</div>Minimum PHP 7.4
With WordPress 7.0 deprecating PHP 7.2 and 7.3, we’ve raised the minimum requirement to PHP 7.4. This lets us clean up compatibility polyfills and use more modern PHP features going forward. If you’re still on an older version, update your PHP before updating the plugin.
Changelog
Added
- Add a help section to interaction dialogs explaining the Fediverse and why entering a profile is needed.
- Add a notice on the Settings page to easily switch from legacy template mode to automatic mode.
- Add a pre-publish suggestion that recommends a post format for better compatibility with media-focused Fediverse platforms.
- Add a Site Health check that warns when plugins are causing too many federation updates.
- Add backwards compatibility for the
ACTIVITYPUB_DISABLE_SIDELOADINGconstant andactivitypub_sideloading_enabledfilter from version 7.9.1. - Add bot account snippet that marks ActivityPub profiles as automated accounts, displaying a “BOT” badge on Mastodon and other Fediverse platforms.
- Add Cache namespace for remote media caching with CLI commands, improved MIME validation, and filter-based architecture.
- Add federation of video poster images set in the WordPress video block.
- Add Locale from Tags community snippet.
- Add optional Like and Boost action buttons to the Fediverse Reactions block, allowing visitors to interact with posts from their own server.
- Add pre-built Fediverse block patterns for easy profile, follow page, and sidebar setup.
- Add snippet for blockless fediverse reactions.
- Add
wp activitypub fetchCLI command for fetching remote URLs with signed HTTP requests.
Changed
- Improved active user counting for NodeInfo to include all federated content types and comments.
- Improve language map resolution to strictly follow the ActivityStreams spec.
- Superseded outbox activities are now removed instead of kept, reducing clutter in the outbox.
- The minimum required PHP version is now 7.4.
Fixed
- Accept incoming activities from servers that use standalone key objects for HTTP Signatures.
- Fix a crash on servers where WordPress uses FTP instead of direct file access for media caching.
- Fix a crash when receiving posts from certain federated platforms that send multilingual content.
- Fix automatic cleanup of old activities failing silently on sites with large numbers of outbox, inbox, or remote post items.
- Fix comment count to properly exclude likes, shares, and notes.
- Fix follow button redirect from Mastodon not being recognized.
- Fix modal overlay not covering the full screen on block themes.
- Fix outbox invalidation canceling pending Accept/Reject responses to QuoteRequests for the same post.
- Fix QuoteRequest handler to derive responding actor from post author instead of inbox recipient.
- Fix reactions block buttons inheriting theme background color on classic themes.
- Fix reactions block layout on small screens and remove unwanted button highlight when clicking action buttons.
- Fix signature verification rejecting valid requests that use lowercase algorithm names in the Digest header.
- Fix soft-deleted posts being served instead of a tombstone when the post is re-saved.
- Improve compatibility with federated services that use a URL reference for the actor’s public key.
- Improve handling of all public audience identifiers when sending activities to followers and relays.
- Prevent private recipient lists from being shared when sending activities to other servers.
Get It
Download from WordPress.org or grab it on GitHub. Remember to check your PHP version first — 7.4 or higher is now required.
A huge thank you to everyone who contributed code, testing, bug reports, and ideas to this release. Special thanks to @kraft, @jeremy, and @futtta for their snippet contributions.
Update, try out those Like and Boost buttons, and let us know what you think — what’s the feature you’ve been waiting for? What would you like to see next?
ActivityPub
Connect your site to the Open Social Web and let millions of users follow, share, and interact with your content from Mastodon, Pixelfed, and more.Automattic (WordPress.org)
To be able to reduce the dependency on those JavaScript files, 2 questions needed to be answered; how to have reactions (which I like a lot) without the JavaScript-driven rendering and what is that remote-reply thing.
