WordLand on self-hosted sites
Thinking about the best approach to make the WordLand editor available for every self-hosted WordPress site
WordLand on self-hosted sites
Thinking about the best approach to make the WordLand editor available for every self-hosted WordPress site
Recommend blogs in the WordPress.com Reader
Over at WordPress.com, we recently added a new feature to the WordPress.com Reader. You can now build a list of blogs you like, and recommend them to others.
Here is how one can access recommended blogs, on the web and via the WordPress.com REST API
Recommend blogs in the WordPress.com Reader
Over at WordPress.com, we recently added a new feature to the WordPress.com Reader. You can now build a list of blogs you like, and recommend them to others.
Here is how one can access recommended blogs, on the web and via the WordPress.com REST API
Dave has been working hard on a new way to interact with your WordPress site: an opinionated, minimalist editor built with writers in mind. As I watch WordLand grow, I can’t help but think about my beginnings with WordPress, more specifically with third-party WordPress editors.
15+ years ago, third-party editors weren’t just nice to have. They were essential. If you were a serious blogger, you probably used MarsEdit on your Mac, or Windows Live Writer on PC. Those 2 editors were probably the biggest third-party editors for WordPress at the time, and were built on top of WordPress’ XML-RPC API. It worked well, except when your hosting provider blocked XML-RPC altogether as a quick fix to avoid XML-RPC pingbacks being used to DDoS sites! That API is still around, and is a good testament for WordPress’ promise of backwards compatibility.
Not only did those editors work well, they were a great alternative to the default post editor in WordPress, which, frankly, sucked for writers using it every day. I remember using it almost exclusively with the “code” view to avoid the dreaded HTML adjustments in the visual editor.
Over the years, MarsEdit and Windows Live Writer slowly disappeared, and a few other options appeared. Here are a few that come to mind:
Fast-forward to today, I don’t think any of those options are that popular anymore. WordPress’ classic editor is still around, but there is a new(-ish) kid on the block with the Gutenberg editor. That editor is still very divisive, especially for folks used to editors of the past.
But if Gutenberg is so problematic, why haven’t third-party editors made a comeback? I have a few theories.
Maybe, despite all its flaws, Gutenberg crossed a critical threshold. It’s not perfect, but it does the job, better than the classic editor did back when third-party editors were necessary, even if some still struggle to adopt the new editor.
Page builders like Elementor have become increasingly popular in the past 10 years. For many new WordPress users, they’re the default post editor interface, they’re the definition of “editing in WordPress” for many. They offer many more visual editing options that third-party editors just cannot offer.
Maybe the market for text-focused editors shrank because WordPress itself pivoted away from text?
While WordPress was largely viewed as a blogging platform 15 years ago, it’s no longer the case today. It powers online stores, small and large business sites, portfolios, and more.
For such site owners, there is no need for an external editor. In fact, there is often no need for posts at all.
This may be my number 1 theory. 15 years ago, shortcodes were the most popular way to add custom content to your WordPress posts. This could be done from a third-party editor with no issues.
Nowadays, many plugins offer blocks that are useful for bloggers. Calls to Action, ads, newsletter popups, social media embeds, … They’re not just formatting tools, they’re useful every day, and they’re all available natively in the core editor. A third-party editor can’t replicate them without rebuilding half of WordPress.
Writers may choose the core editor because using anything else may mean losing traffic and revenue tools.
Third-party editors focused on publishing to WordPress may have become obsolete because there are so many other editors out there, none of them publishing to WordPress. Folks can write in Obsidian, Notion, ChatGPT, … and then copy / paste the output into the core editor. The Gutenberg editor is now a lot more capable of picking up the right format on paste.
Editing consequently happens in custom tools not dedicated to publishing. WordPress is just the final step, the publishing pipeline.
I think there is another force at play that directly challenges Dave’s vision: the rise of bundled publishing platforms like Substack.
Platforms like Substack don’t just offer an editor. They offer you an audience. Your posts can be promoted to Substack readers that are already logged in, can receive newsletters via email, are used to rely on Substack for their daily reading, and have payment methods saved and available in one click to pay you.
This goes against Dave’s ideas of interop and open standards like RSS, because as a creator you don’t have to think about any of that anymore. Instead of thinking about their content flowing freely between platforms with things like ActivityPub or RSS, folks can pick a walled garden where there is no friction. You don’t have to worry about an editor, plugins, you don’t have to know what RSS or ActivityPub is. You can just focus on publishing and trust the platform to do the rest.
“Trust” is the operative word here. You lose a lot of control over your content and your workflow. You lose ownership and data portability, but you may gain something that matters a lot more to you: the eyes of an audience through recommendation engines built by the platform to keep their readers there, and monetization tools to make money from your audience.
I think Dave’s WordLand faces a lot of those challenges, like the other third-party editors I mentioned above. It’s not just a technical challenge though ; it’s a challenge to build something with values that differ from some of the popular platforms out there, like Substack or Bluesky.
That’s not to say it cannot work. 🙂 There will always be a group of people who value content ownership and the open web. In my experience, that group of people actually blogs quite a bit!
I consider myself one of those people. The web still means something special to me.
Dave has been working hard on a new way to interact with your WordPress site: an opinionated, minimalist editor built with writers in mind. As I watch WordLand grow, I can’t help but think about my beginnings with WordPress, more specifically with third-party WordPress editors.
15+ years ago, third-party editors weren’t just nice to have. They were essential. If you were a serious blogger, you probably used MarsEdit on your Mac, or Windows Live Writer on PC. Those 2 editors were probably the biggest third-party editors for WordPress at the time, and were built on top of WordPress’ XML-RPC API. It worked well, except when your hosting provider blocked XML-RPC altogether as a quick fix to avoid XML-RPC pingbacks being used to DDoS sites! That API is still around, and is a good testament for WordPress’ promise of backwards compatibility.
Not only did those editors work well, they were a great alternative to the default post editor in WordPress, which, frankly, sucked for writers using it every day. I remember using it almost exclusively with the “code” view to avoid the dreaded HTML adjustments in the visual editor.
Over the years, MarsEdit and Windows Live Writer slowly disappeared, and a few other options appeared. Here are a few that come to mind:
Fast-forward to today, I don’t think any of those options are that popular anymore. WordPress’ classic editor is still around, but there is a new(-ish) kid on the block with the Gutenberg editor. That editor is still very divisive, especially for folks used to editors of the past.
But if Gutenberg is so problematic, why haven’t third-party editors made a comeback? I have a few theories.
Maybe, despite all its flaws, Gutenberg crossed a critical threshold. It’s not perfect, but it does the job, better than the classic editor did back when third-party editors were necessary, even if some still struggle to adopt the new editor.
Page builders like Elementor have become increasingly popular in the past 10 years. For many new WordPress users, they’re the default post editor interface, they’re the definition of “editing in WordPress” for many. They offer many more visual editing options that third-party editors just cannot offer.
Maybe the market for text-focused editors shrank because WordPress itself pivoted away from text?
While WordPress was largely viewed as a blogging platform 15 years ago, it’s no longer the case today. It powers online stores, small and large business sites, portfolios, and more.
For such site owners, there is no need for an external editor. In fact, there is often no need for posts at all.
This may be my number 1 theory. 15 years ago, shortcodes were the most popular way to add custom content to your WordPress posts. This could be done from a third-party editor with no issues.
Nowadays, many plugins offer blocks that are useful for bloggers. Calls to Action, ads, newsletter popups, social media embeds, … They’re not just formatting tools, they’re useful every day, and they’re all available natively in the core editor. A third-party editor can’t replicate them without rebuilding half of WordPress.
Writers may choose the core editor because using anything else may mean losing traffic and revenue tools.
Third-party editors focused on publishing to WordPress may have become obsolete because there are so many other editors out there, none of them publishing to WordPress. Folks can write in Obsidian, Notion, ChatGPT, … and then copy / paste the output into the core editor. The Gutenberg editor is now a lot more capable of picking up the right format on paste.
Editing consequently happens in custom tools not dedicated to publishing. WordPress is just the final step, the publishing pipeline.
I think there is another force at play that directly challenges Dave’s vision: the rise of bundled publishing platforms like Substack.
Platforms like Substack don’t just offer an editor. They offer you an audience. Your posts can be promoted to Substack readers that are already logged in, can receive newsletters via email, are used to rely on Substack for their daily reading, and have payment methods saved and available in one click to pay you.
This goes against Dave’s ideas of interop and open standards like RSS, because as a creator you don’t have to think about any of that anymore. Instead of thinking about their content flowing freely between platforms with things like ActivityPub or RSS, folks can pick a walled garden where there is no friction. You don’t have to worry about an editor, plugins, you don’t have to know what RSS or ActivityPub is. You can just focus on publishing and trust the platform to do the rest.
“Trust” is the operative word here. You lose a lot of control over your content and your workflow. You lose ownership and data portability, but you may gain something that matters a lot more to you: the eyes of an audience through recommendation engines built by the platform to keep their readers there, and monetization tools to make money from your audience.
I think Dave’s WordLand faces a lot of those challenges, like the other third-party editors I mentioned above. It’s not just a technical challenge though ; it’s a challenge to build something with values that differ from some of the popular platforms out there, like Substack or Bluesky.
That’s not to say it cannot work. 🙂 There will always be a group of people who value content ownership and the open web. In my experience, that group of people actually blogs quite a bit!
I consider myself one of those people. The web still means something special to me.
Earlier today, @davew published a blog post titled WordPress and me. He talked about WordLand, his focused and fast editor for writers and bloggers. Through developing the editor, he’s discovered WordPress again.
I think WordPress has all that’s needed to be the OS of the open social web. We needed it and it’s always been there, and I saw something that I want to show everyone else, that the web can grow from here, we should build on everything that the WordPress community has created. It’s a lot stronger foundation that the other candidates for the basic needs of the open social web, imho.
I’ve been following Dave’s work with WordLand for the past few months, and it’s been really nice and encouraging to see him work on a product that aligns with my values. And now, Dave will get to present his tool and his ideas to others in the WordPress community! He will be talking at WordCamp Canada in October.
It should come as no surprise that someone so involved with some of the key concepts of the Open Web, like RSS, values ideals of openness and giving writers control over their content. WordLand’s approach to « what you see is what you get » is something that aligns so well with WordPress’ own ideals. It clashes with walled gardens like Twitter or Bluesky where you’re limited in length, format, content, and where you ultimately do not own your writing. It’s super motivating and empowering when someone newer to the WordPress ecosystem recognizes those shared values and the power of the platform.
In his post, Dave talked about his journey of rediscovering WordPress through a new lens. The WordPress.com REST API, its endpoints and its authentication layer, gave him the tools to build the editor he needed, while still benefiting from everything the WordPress community has created in the past 22 years.
This is also what we had in mind when Automattic released Calypso 10 years ago:
Calypso is…
- Incredibly fast. It’ll charm you.
- Written purely in JavaScript, leveraging libraries like Node and React.
- 100% API-powered. Those APIs are open, and now available to every developer in the world.
Calypso and its underlying API paved the way for the first REST API endpoints that made it to WordPress itself a year later. That API then became a cornerstone of the Gutenberg project:
WordPress has always been about the user experience, and that needs to continue to evolve under newer demands. Gutenberg is an attempt at fundamentally addressing those needs, based on the idea of content blocks. It’s an attempt to improve how users interact with their content in a fundamentally visual way, while at the same time giving developers the tools to create more fulfilling experiences for the people they are helping.
On a more technical note, the folks more familiar with WordPress will wonder why WordLand uses the WordPress.com REST API, and not the core WordPress REST API.
Dave chose to use the WordPress.com API for WordLand — and that makes perfect sense for the goals of the project. It provides built-in authentication and opinionated endpoints that would otherwise need to be built on top of the core REST API, and would need to be shipped to every site that wants to use the WordLand editor. That’s simply not what WordLand was designed to do.
Perhaps more importantly, the WordPress.com REST API is just one of the many ways to interact with WordPress. That’s the beauty of WordPress: it’s open and flexible, allowing different tools and solutions to thrive. In this case, it’s nice to see how WordLand, WordPress, and WordPress.com came together to empower writers, each bringing their own strengths to the table. It’s a great example of how open tools and platforms can work hand-in-hand to create something truly special.
It’s always exciting to see new tools emerge from old foundations — and even more so when they help bring us closer to the open web we want to build. Funny enough, the WordPress.com REST API still relies on XML-RPC — a technology built by Dave 27 years ago 🙂
If you haven’t tried WordLand yet, go give it a try! All you need is a WordPress site, either hosted on WordPress.com or running the Jetpack plugin.
A few days ago, @florianziegler suggested that all of us running blogs with RSS feeds make a small change:
Please add your email address to your RSS feed.
This email address can be used by RSS feed readers to display an Email button next to each feed entry, so folks can reply to the post via email instead of visiting the post on your site to leave a comment.
That seems like a good idea. I found that there was no WordPress plugin that allowed that out of the box, so I built my own. If you’re a blogger and use WordPress, give it a try!
https://wordpress.org/plugins/rss-reply-via-email/
Next step will be for more feed readers to support that issue. I consequently opened an issue for my feed reader of choice, NetNewsWire, to support this, and another for the Android app I use, FocusReader. If you use a different feed reader, don’t hesitate to contact them about it!
A few days ago, @florianziegler suggested that all of us running blogs with RSS feeds make a small change:
Please add your email address to your RSS feed.
This email address can be used by RSS feed readers to display an Email button next to each feed entry, so folks can reply to the post via email instead of visiting the post on your site to leave a comment.
That seems like a good idea. I found that there was no WordPress plugin that allowed that out of the box, so I built my own. If you’re a blogger and use WordPress, give it a try!
https://wordpress.org/plugins/rss-reply-via-email/
Next step will be for more feed readers to support that issue. I consequently opened an issue for my feed reader of choice, NetNewsWire, to support this, and another for the Android app I use, FocusReader. If you use a different feed reader, don’t hesitate to contact them about it!
Earlier today, @davew published a blog post titled WordPress and me. He talked about WordLand, his focused and fast editor for writers and bloggers. Through developing the editor, he’s discovered WordPress again.
I think WordPress has all that’s needed to be the OS of the open social web. We needed it and it’s always been there, and I saw something that I want to show everyone else, that the web can grow from here, we should build on everything that the WordPress community has created. It’s a lot stronger foundation that the other candidates for the basic needs of the open social web, imho.
I’ve been following Dave’s work with WordLand for the past few months, and it’s been really nice and encouraging to see him work on a product that aligns with my values. And now, Dave will get to present his tool and his ideas to others in the WordPress community! He will be talking at WordCamp Canada in October.
It should come as no surprise that someone so involved with some of the key concepts of the Open Web, like RSS, values ideals of openness and giving writers control over their content. WordLand’s approach to « what you see is what you get » is something that aligns so well with WordPress’ own ideals. It clashes with walled gardens like Twitter or Bluesky where you’re limited in length, format, content, and where you ultimately do not own your writing. It’s super motivating and empowering when someone newer to the WordPress ecosystem recognizes those shared values and the power of the platform.
In his post, Dave talked about his journey of rediscovering WordPress through a new lens. The WordPress.com REST API, its endpoints and its authentication layer, gave him the tools to build the editor he needed, while still benefiting from everything the WordPress community has created in the past 22 years.
This is also what we had in mind when Automattic released Calypso 10 years ago:
Calypso is…
- Incredibly fast. It’ll charm you.
- Written purely in JavaScript, leveraging libraries like Node and React.
- 100% API-powered. Those APIs are open, and now available to every developer in the world.
Calypso and its underlying API paved the way for the first REST API endpoints that made it to WordPress itself a year later. That API then became a cornerstone of the Gutenberg project:
WordPress has always been about the user experience, and that needs to continue to evolve under newer demands. Gutenberg is an attempt at fundamentally addressing those needs, based on the idea of content blocks. It’s an attempt to improve how users interact with their content in a fundamentally visual way, while at the same time giving developers the tools to create more fulfilling experiences for the people they are helping.
On a more technical note, the folks more familiar with WordPress will wonder why WordLand uses the WordPress.com REST API, and not the core WordPress REST API.
Dave chose to use the WordPress.com API for WordLand — and that makes perfect sense for the goals of the project. It provides built-in authentication and opinionated endpoints that would otherwise need to be built on top of the core REST API, and would need to be shipped to every site that wants to use the WordLand editor. That’s simply not what WordLand was designed to do.
Perhaps more importantly, the WordPress.com REST API is just one of the many ways to interact with WordPress. That’s the beauty of WordPress: it’s open and flexible, allowing different tools and solutions to thrive. In this case, it’s nice to see how WordLand, WordPress, and WordPress.com came together to empower writers, each bringing their own strengths to the table. It’s a great example of how open tools and platforms can work hand-in-hand to create something truly special.
It’s always exciting to see new tools emerge from old foundations — and even more so when they help bring us closer to the open web we want to build. Funny enough, the WordPress.com REST API still relies on XML-RPC — a technology built by Dave 27 years ago 🙂
If you haven’t tried WordLand yet, go give it a try! All you need is a WordPress site, either hosted on WordPress.com or running the Jetpack plugin.
Your WordPress site and the ActivityPub protocol are doing all the work. 🙂
There are no character limits for the posts your WordPress site sends to the Fediverse because your site has no character limit. Same with the supported syntax.
Each Fediverse client then decides how to display the content from the posts your site sent to the inbox of your followers. Most apps (like the Mastodon app, Tusky, or the Mastodon web interface) support basic HTML, so you can expect content to appear more or less like on your site.
You could, for example, insert block quotes:
you can follow my daveverse blog, which I write using WordLand, on Mastodon — @scripting.
http://scripting.com/2025/05/23.html#a151738
You could also mention other Fediverse users, like @davew, and they’ll get a notification in their app of choice.
Tags you add to your post are displayed as hashtags in your follower’s feed.
I wrote this post on my own WordPress site, in response to your ActivityPub-compatible WordPress post, and I mentioned your Mastodon account. You can consequently expect 2 mentions: one in the app you use for your Mastodon account, the other as a comment on your WordPress site (well, only you don’t display comments on your site!).
