Webmention

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By sending a Webmention to a site you’ve linked to, you can notify its owner. Upon receipt, that website may then display your post as a comment, “like,” or another form of response, facilitating a direct conversation across the web.
A Webmention is fundamentally a notification of a link between two URLs. Its use extends beyond blog posts to various content types and responses, including RSVPs to events, “likes,” and “bookmarks.” Webmention powers these cross-site interactions, forming the foundation of a distributed social web.
The Webmention plugin provides full support for this protocol, enabling your site to send and receive Webmentions and present them using a straightforward, built-in design.

What are Webmentions?
Webmention is a simple way to automatically notify any URL when you link to it on your site. From the receivers perpective, it’s a way to request notification when other sites link to it.

That Sounds Like a Pingback or a Trackback

Webmention is an update/replacement for Pingback or Trackback. Unlike the older protocols, the specification is recommended by the W3C as well as an active community of individuals using it on their sites.

How can I send and receive Webmentions?

On the Settings –> Discussion Page in WordPress:

  • On the Webmention Settings page, decide which post types you want to enable Webmentions for. By default, posts and pages.
  • Set a page to redirect homepage mentions to. This will automatically enable Webmentions for that page.
  • If you want to enable a Webmention form in the comment section, check the box.

You can use the send_webmention($source, $target) function and pass a source and a target or you can fire an action like do_action('send_webmention', $source, $target).

How do I support Webmentions for my custom post type?

When declaring your custom post type, add post type support for Webmentions by either including it in your register_post_type entry. This can also be added in the Webmention settings.

How do I send/receive Webmentions for attachments?

You can enable receiving Webmentions for attachments in Webmention settings. You can enable sending Webmentions for media links in the settings. Please note that most receivers of Webmentions do not support receiving them to image, audio, and video files. In order to support receiving them on WordPress, Webmention endpoint headers would have to be added at the webserver level.