Post Kinds for IndieWeb in Block Themes

Post Kinds for IndieWeb in Block Themes is a block-editor successor to the classic Post Kinds plugin.

A post kind is a label that describes what a post is — a note, a check-in, a song you listened to, a movie you watched — rather than what it’s about. The idea comes from the IndieWeb movement: publish your activity on your own site instead of (or in addition to) social networks and tracking apps.

The original Post Kinds plugin was built for the Classic Editor. This plugin is built for the block editor and block themes.

What you get

• 27 custom blocks — 23 editor blocks (card blocks for most kinds, plus utilities like Star Rating, Media Lookup, Check-in Dashboard, Check-ins Feed, and Venue Detail), 3 server-rendered blocks (Now Playing, Media Stats, Recent Kinds), and the Stream Card, which is registered in PHP, hidden from the inserter, and stands in for Post Content inside the Stream query loop
• API-powered search — find music, movies, books, games, and venues directly from the editor
• Bulk import — pull in your history from Last.fm, Trakt, Hardcover, and more
• Real-time scrobbling — webhooks for Plex, Jellyfin, Trakt, and ListenBrainz. Scrobbling means automatically logging each song or show as you play it.
• microformats2 markup on every post. Microformats are standard HTML classes that let other IndieWeb sites and tools read your posts as structured data — a listen, an RSVP, a check-in — instead of plain text.
• Automatic featured images — album art, posters, and book covers from your media posts become the featured image when a post has none.
• A firehose feed at /firehose — your site’s RSS plus the bulk-imported posts that normal feeds leave out.
• Standard.site records — when a page you bookmark publishes its metadata to AT Protocol, read the author’s own title, description, and tags instead of guessing from the page. No account or setup needed.
• Standard.site publishing — add the optional ATmosphere companion plugin (2.1.0+) and your own posts publish as Standard.site documents on AT Protocol. Post Kinds adds what ATmosphere can’t know: which kinds publish by default, readable titles for untitled posts (“Listened to … by …”, “Checked in at …”), the kind as a tag, and check-in privacy rules. Everything else in Post Kinds works without it.

Post kinds

• Listen — music, podcasts, and audio (MusicBrainz, ListenBrainz, Last.fm)
• Watch — movies, TV shows, and videos (TMDB, Trakt, Simkl, TVMaze)
• Read — books and articles (Open Library, Google Books, Hardcover)
• Checkin — places and venues (Foursquare, OpenStreetMap), with per-post location privacy
• Play — video games and board games (RAWG, BoardGameGeek)
• Eat / Drink — food and beverages
• Jam — music you love, with oEmbed previews
• RSVP — event responses (yes, no, maybe, interested, remote)
• Event — events with date, time, and location; the Event Card can pull details from The Events Calendar or My Calendar
• Like, Reply, Repost, Bookmark — IndieWeb interactions
• Favorite, Wish, Mood, Acquisition — personal tracking
• Follow, Tag, Quote, Issue, Question — more IndieWeb response types
• Audio, Weather, Exercise, Sleep, Trip, Itinerary, Craft — logs and experimental kinds

Along with Note, Article, Photo, Video, Review, and Recipe, that’s the full 36-kind vocabulary of the classic Post Kinds plugin. Kinds without a dedicated card block still render as cards on the Stream and carry correct microformats2 markup.

Each kind gets its own archive page (for example /kind/listen/), and the kind is set automatically from the first card block in a post — or pick it yourself in the Post Kind editor panel.

Import and sync

• Bulk import from ListenBrainz, Last.fm, Trakt, Simkl, and Hardcover
• Webhooks for Plex, Jellyfin, Trakt, and ListenBrainz
• Background processing via WP-Cron for large imports, with duplicate prevention on re-imports
• Optional syndication (POSSE) — post on your own site first, then send a copy to Last.fm, Trakt, or Foursquare. Off by default; nothing is sent unless you enable it.

Works with

• Micropub — required for posting from Micropub apps. This plugin doesn’t implement the Micropub endpoint itself; install the Micropub plugin (plus IndieAuth for authentication), and this plugin classifies every incoming post as its kind — all registered kinds, not just the common ones — and converts it into the right card block or microformats paragraph. Clients that know their kind can name it outright with a pkiw-kind property; Outpost does.
• IndieBlocks — detected and recommended, not required. It provides companion blocks (Facepile, Location, Syndication, Link Preview); this plugin doesn’t implement those features itself.
• Webmention — detected on the Integrations settings tab. Cross-site conversations come from that plugin, not this one.
• Syndication Links, Post Formats for Block Themes, Bookmark Card — detected and enhanced when present.
• ATmosphere — optional companion (2.1.0+) for Standard.site publishing on AT Protocol. ATmosphere owns the connection and the records; this plugin decides which kinds publish, derives readable titles for untitled posts, and applies check-in privacy rules. Everything else works without it.
• Link Extension for XFN — detected on the Integrations settings tab. Adds XFN relationship options to the block editor’s link popover, so a reply or mention can say how you know the person.
• The Events Calendar and My Calendar — either one feeds the Event card. Event name, start, end, location, and URL are read from whichever is installed; with neither, the card falls back to its own fields.
• WP Recipe Maker — a post containing a WPRM recipe is detected, and the recipe kind is suggested for it.
• ActivityPub — a recommendation only; this plugin contains no ActivityPub integration.
• RSS Chat — a recommendation only; this plugin contains no rss.chat integration, and RSS Chat is on GitHub rather than WordPress.org. It syndicates posts carrying the core chat post format, which is separate from kinds, so a note or a reply is not sent to rss.chat unless you also set that format on it. Whether that check could become filterable, so a kind could decide instead, is open upstream: issue #6.

Conflicts

• Post Kinds (indieweb-post-kinds) — hard conflict. Both plugins register the same kind taxonomy, so this plugin refuses to run while the classic Post Kinds plugin is active and shows an admin notice instead. Deactivate one of them.

External services

This plugin integrates with external services for media metadata lookups, history imports, scrobbling, and syndication. Every connection is optional: nothing is contacted until you enable a service, save its credentials, use its lookup, or paste one of its links. What follows lists each service, what is sent and when, and its terms and privacy policy.

Media lookup services (used when you search from the editor, Quick Post, or the Media Lookup block)

Each lookup sends your search text (a title, artist, venue name, or similar) plus your stored API key or credentials for that service, only at the moment you run a search or refresh metadata.

• MusicBrainz — music metadata (albums, artists, recordings). Also sends the app name/contact you configure, per their API etiquette. Terms, Privacy.
• TMDB (The Movie Database) — movie and TV metadata and artwork. Terms, Privacy. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
• TVMaze — TV show metadata. Terms, Privacy.
• Google Books — book metadata. Terms, Privacy.
• Open Library (Internet Archive) — book metadata and covers. Terms and privacy.
• Hardcover — book metadata and reading data. Terms, Privacy.
• Podcast Index — podcast and episode metadata. Terms, Privacy.
• RAWG — video game metadata. Terms, Privacy.
• BoardGameGeek — board game metadata. Terms, Privacy.
• Foursquare — venue search for check-ins (sends your search text and, when you allow it, coordinates to find nearby venues). Terms, Privacy.

Connected accounts (used for history imports, scheduled sync, scrobbling, and syndication)

When you connect an account, the plugin stores your token and, on import, scheduled sync, or when you publish a post with that service’s syndication toggle on, sends the data needed for that action (your listen/watch/check-in details, plus your token).

• Last.fm — listening history import and scrobbling your listen posts. Terms, Privacy.
• ListenBrainz — listening history import and scrobble submission. Terms, Privacy.
• Trakt — watch history import, sync, and check-ins. Terms, Privacy.
• Simkl — watch history import and sync. Terms, Privacy.
• Untappd — drink check-in import. Terms, Privacy.
• Foursquare/Swarm — check-in import via OAuth. Terms, Privacy.
• Readwise — reading highlights import. Terms, Privacy.

Geocoding and maps

• Nominatim (OpenStreetMap Foundation) — converts a check-in’s coordinates or place text into an address (and back). Sends the location you’re checking in to and the contact email you configure, only when you create or edit a check-in that needs geocoding. Usage policy, Privacy.
• OpenStreetMap embeds — when a published check-in shows a map, the visitor’s browser loads an embedded map from openstreetmap.org containing that check-in’s coordinates. Site visitors’ browsers connect to OpenStreetMap when viewing those posts. Terms, Privacy.

Link identification

• Letterboxd — when you paste a Letterboxd link into a watch post, the plugin fetches that page once to identify the film. Only the URL you pasted is requested. Terms, Privacy.

Standard.site records on AT Protocol (used when you check a cited URL)

When you choose “Check this URL” on a bookmark, like, reply, repost, favorite, jam, or wish card, or a few seconds after you publish a post containing one, the plugin looks for a standard.site record published by the page you cited. Nothing about you or your site is sent, and no account or credential is involved: these are public, unauthenticated reads.

• The cited page — requested once to read its site.standard.document tag. Only the URL you already linked to is requested, the same as the Letterboxd fetch above. Terms and privacy are whatever that site publishes.
• plc.directory — receives the identifier found in that tag and returns the address of the server holding the record. Operated by Bluesky Social PBC. Not contacted for did:web identifiers, which name their own host. Terms, Privacy.
• The author’s Personal Data Server — receives the record’s identifier and returns the record. This host is not a fixed service: it is whichever server the author of the page you cited uses, so which hosts are contacted depends on which pages you bookmark. Terms and privacy are whatever that server’s operator publishes.

Results are cached for a day, including pages that publish no record, so a page is not re-fetched every time you save. The plugin only reads. It never publishes your posts to AT Protocol.

Book previews

• Amazon Kindle previews — when you paste an Amazon or Kindle book link into a read post (or a bulk import creates one), the post can embed that book’s preview from read.amazon.com. The preview frame is loaded by the editor’s and site visitors’ browsers directly from Amazon, with only the book’s ID in the URL; the plugin itself sends nothing to Amazon. Conditions of Use, Privacy Notice.

Inbound webhooks (no data sent)

Plex, Jellyfin, Trakt, ListenBrainz, and OwnTracks scrobbling works through webhooks: those services send data to your site at the secret URL you configure. The plugin makes no outbound request to them for this feature.

AI features

The optional AI enhancements use the WordPress AI Client bundled with WordPress 7.0+, which routes requests to whatever AI provider the site administrator has configured in WordPress itself. This plugin does not contact any AI service directly and sends nothing unless you invoke an AI action.

Privacy Policy

This plugin:

• Stores all post data locally in your WordPress database — no custom tables
• Makes API calls to external services only when you search for media, paste a media URL, run imports, or receive a webhook
• Does not track users or send analytics
• Stores API keys and OAuth tokens in the WordPress options table; they are removed when you uninstall the plugin
• Sends your activity to Last.fm, Trakt, or Foursquare only when you enable those syndication toggles

External services contacted (when you use the matching feature):

• MusicBrainz / ListenBrainz — music metadata (no API key required)
• Last.fm — music metadata and scrobbling history
• TMDB — movie and TV show metadata
• Trakt / Simkl / TVMaze — movie and TV tracking
• Open Library / Google Books / Hardcover — book metadata
• RAWG / BoardGameGeek — game metadata
• Podcast Index — podcast metadata
• Foursquare — venue information
• OpenStreetMap / Nominatim — geocoding and map data
• Letterboxd — fetched when you paste a Letterboxd URL into a Watch Card, to find the matching movie
• Amazon (read.amazon.com) — Kindle book previews embedded in read posts load in the browser directly from Amazon

Each external service has its own privacy policy. API calls retrieve public metadata for the items you look up.

Credits

• Author: Courtney Robertson
• Original plugin: Post Kinds
• Built for the IndieWeb community
• Uses open data from MusicBrainz, TMDB, Open Library, RAWG, OpenStreetMap, and other services

Requirements

• WordPress 7.0 or later
• PHP 8.2 or later

From your WordPress admin

1. Go to Plugins > Add New
2. Search for Post Kinds for IndieWeb in Block Themes
3. Click Install Now, then Activate

From GitHub

1. Clone or download from GitHub
2. Run composer install and npm run build
3. Upload to /wp-content/plugins/post-kinds-for-indieweb-in-block-themes/ and activate

After activation

1. Go to Reactions > Settings to review defaults
2. Add API keys under Reactions > API Connections for the services you want (TMDB, Last.fm, etc.)
3. MusicBrainz and Open Library work without API keys
4. Create a post and add a card block — the post kind is assigned automatically

1. 

   Listen Card block displaying a song with album art and rating

2. 

   Watch Card block showing a movie with poster and review

3. 

   Read Card block with book cover and reading progress

4. 

   Checkin Card with location and venue details

5. 

   API configuration settings for external services

6. 

   General settings page with plugin options

7. 

   Block inserter showing all post kind blocks

8. 

   Three published check-ins showing how each privacy level redacts location detail

9. 

   Standard.site record panel on a Bookmark Card, showing the cited page's own title, publication, description, and tags read from AT Protocol

1.7.1

• Fixed: long mood posts lost their emoji on the Stream. The compact card now shows the emoji from the post’s mood card.
• Fixed: mood posts read as a stack of stray lines in feed readers. Feeds now show the emoji inline with the post text instead of the flattened card markup.
• Fixed: choosing the quote post format now maps to the quote kind instead of repost.
• Fixed: a search that found nothing kept saying “no results found” for a full day, even after the service recovered. Empty lookups now retry after five minutes.
• Fixed: the plugin download no longer includes the directory-listing artwork, making it noticeably smaller.

1.7.0

• Added: four more kinds — chicken, comics, collection, and presentation — bringing the total to 40.
• Added: the Play Card has six looks to choose from in the editor’s Styles panel — board game, console game, computer game, card game, dice game, and tabletop RPG. It picks one for you based on what it knows about the game, and leaves your choice alone if you’ve made one.
• Added: sites can now give their own custom kinds an icon in the kind picker, instead of every custom kind showing the generic note icon. Developers: the new postKindsIndieweb.kindIcons JavaScript filter.
• Added: the Micropub bridge understands every registered kind, not just the original 16, and clients can name a kind outright with the new pkiw-kind property.
• Fixed: publishing a book post after a lookup failed with “meta._pkiw_read_isbn is not of type string”. Lookup services return ISBNs, IDs, and years as numbers where the plugin stores text, which made WordPress reject the whole save. Values are now converted where they’re stored, so every lookup field is covered rather than just the ones reported.

1.6.0

• Added: Standard.site publishing through the optional ATmosphere companion plugin (2.1.0 or later). Public content and public logs — notes, articles, photos, videos, reviews, recipes, events, listens, watches, reads, plays, eats, drinks, jams, replies, bookmarks, and RSVPs — publish as Standard.site documents by default once ATmosphere is connected; likes, reposts, favorites, follows, check-ins, moods, and the other privacy-sensitive kinds stay off until you turn them on, per kind or per post. Untitled posts get readable derived titles (“Listened to … by …”, “Checked in at …” — or just “Checked in” for a private check-in), the kind rides along as a tag, and a post’s own sharing toggle always has the final say. Posts that already published are never removed by a settings change, and nothing backfills automatically. Post Kinds works fully without ATmosphere.
• Added: a Standard.site column on the posts list showing each post’s publish state, and per-kind publishing controls on the Integrations settings tab.
• Fixed: hidden microformats markers no longer appear in ATmosphere’s record previews, so what you preview is exactly what publishes.

1.5.2

• Fixed: the Check-in Dashboard block crashed in the editor for everyone who inserted it, with any settings. It read its data feed in the wrong shape.
• Fixed: the Play Card crashed in the editor whenever its status differed from the default — pasted, imported, or pattern-inserted cards hit this every time.
• Fixed: Event and RSVP cards crashed in the editor on a date they couldn’t parse, and a similar problem in several cards’ saving code could block a post from saving at all. Every date now degrades gracefully instead.
• Fixed: the Check-in Dashboard’s “Check-ins” and “Countries” stats always showed 0 regardless of your data.
• Fixed: the cover image’s remove control was a button nested inside another button in all eleven card blocks — invalid HTML that confuses screen readers, and it was invisible to keyboard users. It’s now a proper sibling control that appears on keyboard focus too.
• Changed: the plugin download shrinks from 4.8M to 0.6M — a folder of marketing imagery that the plugin never loads no longer ships.

1.5.1

• Fixed: the /firehose feed added in 1.5.0 returned 404 on any site that updated rather than installed fresh, and stayed that way. Rewrite rules were only rebuilt on activation, which WordPress doesn’t run on update, so the feed’s address was never registered. Updating now rebuilds them.
• Fixed: kinds added in a previous update now show up right away. They were only filled in on a wp-admin page load, so a freshly-updated site briefly showed 24 kinds instead of 36 and 404’d the newer kind archives for visitors.

1.5.0

• Fixed: a kind post’s microformats2 property (u-like-of, u-listen-of, and the rest) now attaches to an h-entry at the post’s own URL — the page webmention receivers actually fetch. Block themes whose single template never calls post_class() (Twenty Twenty-Five, Twenty Twenty-Four) left the card parsing as an orphan citation; the plugin now supplies its own h-entry wrapper there, with the permalink and publish date included, and steps aside on themes that already provide one.
• Fixed: the Stream Card registers with block API version 3 like every other block.
• Fixed: the plugin package includes its stylesheet and admin assets again — a packaging manifest had gone stale, so the downloaded zip was missing the card design tokens and the whole admin interface.
• Fixed: card links show a visible focus outline again for keyboard users — the style referenced a color token the plugin never defines, which silently removed the outline entirely.
• Fixed: favorite, eat, drink, play, jam, mood, acquisition, and wish posts now carry their microformats root at the post’s own URL, like every other kind.
• Tested up to WordPress 7.1, with the CI test matrix now covering 7.0 and 7.1 on PHP 8.2–8.4.
• Added: an Event Card block with h-event microformats. The event’s start date renders under the title so themes can feature the event date instead of the publish date.
• Added: the Event Card can pull its details from The Events Calendar or My Calendar at render time — optional, feature-detected, and only publicly viewable events resolve.
• Added: the 12 remaining IndieWeb post kinds — audio, quote, tag, weather, exercise, trip, itinerary, follow, issue, question, sleep, and craft — completing the full 36-kind vocabulary of the classic Post Kinds plugin. Each appears in the kind pickers with its own icon and carries kind-appropriate microformats2 markup.
• Added: read standard.site records from pages you cite. When a bookmarked page publishes its metadata to AT Protocol, the block sidebar can show the author’s own title, description, tags, and publication instead of guessing from the page. Read-only and unauthenticated — no account, no setup, and your posts are never published to AT Protocol. A record is only stored on your post once it points back at the page it was found on, so a page cannot claim someone else’s writing.
• Added: a firehose RSS feed at /firehose that includes bulk-imported posts.
• Added: a pkiw_kind_label filter so themes can swap each card’s visible kind label, and a pk-caption wrapper grouping each card’s title, date, and sub lines for styling.
• Fixed: posts without a title no longer disappear from the Stream — the kind label stands in as the linked title, and any kind renders a complete card.
• Fixed: the plugin’s abilities (Abilities API) now actually register; their old underscore names were rejected by WordPress core.
• Fixed: a bookmark post built with the Bookmark Card no longer gets an empty Embed block inserted above it in the editor.
• Fixed: no more “doing it wrong” notice when Post Formats for Block Themes also registers the shared block-bindings source.
• Added: media artwork (album covers, posters, book covers) becomes the post’s featured image when none is set, with a pkiw_set_featured_from_artwork filter to opt out and a wp postkind featured-artwork backfill command for existing posts.
• Added: kind artwork reaches Yoast SEO’s schema graph as the primary image when Yoast finds none itself.
• Added: listen, watch, jam, and play card fields mirror into post meta on save, so themes and plugins can read them without parsing blocks.

1.0.0

• Initial WordPress.org release: 24 post kinds with card blocks, media lookup, imports and webhook scrobbling, microformats2 markup, syndication, and Micropub support. Development history for the pre-release builds lives in CHANGELOG.md in the GitHub repository.
• Security: syndication handlers require the per-post edit_post capability, closing an IDOR where a user with generic edit_posts could syndicate another user’s post.
• Security: Letterboxd lookups use wp_safe_remote_get with reject_unsafe_urls, so a redirect target can’t reach private or loopback hosts.
• Fixed: like, reply, repost, bookmark, favorite, listen, watch, and read posts expose the correct microformats2 markup, so webmention receivers and feed readers recognize them as their kind.