Timeline

After months of reading, experimenting and a lot of coding, I'm happy that the first release candidate of the Drupal IndieWeb module is out. I guess this makes the perfect time to try it out for yourself, no? There are a lot of concepts within the IndieWeb universe, and many are supported by the module. In fact, there are 8 submodules, so it might be daunting to start figuring out which ones to enable and what they exactly allow you to do. To kick start anyone interested, I'll explain in a few steps how you can send a webmention to this page. Can you mention me?

Step 1: enabling modules

After you downloaded the module and installed the required composer packages, enable following modules: IndieWeb, Webmention and Microformats2. In case you are not authenticated as user 1, also toggle the following permissions: 'Administer IndieWeb configuration' and 'Send webmention'.

Step 2: expose author information

To discover the author of a website after receiving a webmention, your homepage, or the canonical url of a post needs author information. The module comes with an Author block so you can quickly expose a block where you can configure your name. Your real name or nickname is fine, as long as there's something. The minimal markup should look like something like this:

Step 3: configure webmention module

All configuration exposed by the modules lives under 'Web services' > 'IndieWeb' at /admin/config/services/indieweb. To configure sending webmentions go to /admin/config/services/indieweb/webmention/send. Ignore the ' Syndication targets' fieldset and scroll down to ' Custom URL's for content' and toggle the 'Expose textfield' checkbox.

Scroll down a bit more and configure how you want to send webmentions, either by cron or drush (webmentions are stored in a queue first for performance reasons)

Step 4: configure Microformats module

When sending a webmention to me, it would be nice to be able to figure out what exactly your post is. To achieve this, we need to add markup to the HTML by using CSS classes. Let's configure the minimal markup at /admin/config/services/indieweb/microformats by toggling following checkboxes:

• h-entry on node wrappers
• e-content on standard body fields. In case your node type does not use the standard body field, enter the field name in the 'e-content on other textarea fields' textarea.
• dt-published, p-name, u-author and u-url in a hidden span element on nodes.

Now create a post!

Create a post with a title and body. Your body needs to contain a link with a class so that when I receive your webmention, I know that this page is valid. As an example, we're going to write a reply:

Save the post and verify the markup more or less looks like underneath. Make sure you see following classes: h-entry, u-url, p-name, dt-published, e-content, u-author.

If everything looks fine, go to the node form again. Open the 'Publish to' fieldset where you can enter 'https://realize.be/blog/send-me-webmention-drupal' in the custom URL textfield. Save again and check the send list at /admin/content/webmention/send-list. It should tell that there is one item in the queue. As a final step, run cron or the 'indieweb-send-webmentions' drush command. After that the queue should be empty and one entry will be in the send list and I should have received your webmention!

Note: You can vary between the 'u-in-reply-to', 'u-like-of' or 'u-repost-of' class. Basically, the class determines your response type. The first class will create a comment on this post. The other two classes will be a mention in the sidebar.

What's next?

Well, a lot of course. But the next step should be receiving webmentions no? If you go to /admin/config/services/indieweb/webmention, you can enable receiving webmentions by using the built-in endpoint. Make sure you expose the link tag so I know where to mention you!

I tried it, and it didn't work!

Maybe I missed something in the tutorial. Or you have found a bug :) Feel free to ping me on irc.freenode.net on #indieweb-dev or #drupal-contribute. You may also open an issue at https://github.com/swentel/indieweb

Lately, Mastodon is getting a lot of attention as an alternative for Twitter. It's a microblogging platform which allows you to setup your own instance, and still interact with users on a totally different domain. They are all part of the Fediverse. It uses open standard protocols and specifications as much as possible, which means that integration from other places should be possible, e.g. why not your own site !

Webmentions

To interact with Mastodon, and most other federated platforms, you need to implement Activitypub and add Webfinger support to your domain, which can be tricky to setup. Enter Bridgy Fed: it acts as a proxy for your domain and does all the heavy lifting for discovery, sending posts to the right instance and sending back interactions to your site. The Drupal IndieWeb module has all the necessary tools for sending and receiving webmentions and the markup needed for your content. In fact, there are only two simple things you need to do. Add "Fediverse|https://fed.brid.gy/" on the 'Sending' settings screen as a syndication target and two lines to .htaccess, and you're done: welcome to the Fediverse. Don't like Drupal ? No problem! Any framework, whether you are using Wordpress or Known, or even wrote yourself, which supports sending webmentions can get on the Fediverse! Read about webmentions and microformats on IndieWeb.org.

Following

If you are on Mastodon, you can follow me by searching for 'swentel' which will give you two results. One is a test account I use for testing the AP protocol. The user that is managed by Bridgy Fed, and which will now get all the notes I syndicate from my site, is @realize.be@realize.be.

Since I don't have an actual account, how do I follow users? Mastodon exposes an atom and even a Microformats feed of every user. This allows everyone to follow accounts with even a simple RSS reader. In my case, I use Indigenous as my reader, and Aperture as the server (actually, I'm using the built-in server now in the IndieWeb module, but Aperture is a great alternative to get started!). From my client, I can directly interact with anyone on the Fediverse because it knows my micropub endpoint to post to my site which then starts syndicating posts to the right instance: replying, liking, boosting, posting .. it all works! Some tiny details need to be figured out still, like images, but simple content just works fine!

All of this has been tested with Mastodon. There are more federated platforms out there, so this is only the beginning! A big shout out to Ryan Barret, the maintainer of Bridgy Fed (and many other great tools)!