Shortnotes

Shortnotes adds a custom post type, Notes, used to publish short pieces of content on your website, similar to social networks like Mastodon, Twitter, or Instagram.

No titles

The Notes post type does not support traditional titles.

Note titles are not generally meant to be displayed as part of the theme layout. You will likely need to adjust the look and feel of your theme accordingly. See the Theme Customization section below for more details.

A title is generated automatically from note content and is used as the note’s document title. This is readable by search engines and displayed in browser tabs.

Limited blocks

The Notes post type supports basic content blocks like paragraph, list, quote, image, preformatted text, gallery, video, and embed. Using a defined list of relatively simple blocks helps to keep notes simple.

Webmention support

The Notes post type includes support for the Webmention and Semantic-Linkbacks plugins.

URLs in note content are processed as possible webmentions.

A panel in the block editor allows for the addition of a reply to URL and name. When entered, they are used to provide markup for a semantic webmention reply.

Reply to template tag

The reply specification works best when the u-in-reply-to element is outside of the main content element, defined by e-content.

A template tag is provided as part of the Shortnotes plugin that can be used to output reply to markup in your theme.

<article class="h-entry">
    <?php
    if ( function_exists( 'ShortNotes\PostType\Note\reply_to_markup' ) ) {
        \ShortNotes\PostType\Note\reply_to_markup();
    }
    ?>
    <div class="entry-content e-content">
        <?php the_content(); ?>
    </div><!-- .entry-content -->
</article>

If this template tag is not used, then the Shortnotes plugin will automatically prepend the reply to markup to the_content.

Theme Customization

No customization of your theme is required to use this plugin, though you will likely want to think through how titles are displayed and if you want full support for webmentions.

If you do find yourself wanting to customize, I have made adjustments to my site’s theme, a child theme of Twenty Twenty One, while developing this plugin, that can be used as an example.

Those adjustments (a) remove the display of a title for the note post type and (b) output reply to markup outside of the main content element.