Buckle Up

You might know that I – with the generous help from Brandon Kelly on the Craft 5 version – wrote and maintain a Webmention plugin for Craft CMS. Today, I shipped version 1.3.0. It’s a security and abuse hardening release, and if you’re running the plugin, you should upgrade. The backstory of this one is, at least to me, kind of interesting. Back in March, I added a new feature to the plugin: a Failed Webmentions view in the Craft control panel. The reason was simple. Building a Webmention endpoint that both sends and receives reliably is genuinely hard. There’s a lot of sifting through specs and documentation involved. You have to handle a wide range of markup flavours, work around different interpretations of microformats, and add fallbacks for all the times when somebody didn’t implement something the way you’d expect, the parser falls over, and you still want to recover gracefully. The whole thing is supposed to follow the robustness principle: be conservative in what you send, be…