Integration with the Event Federation Plugin for WordPress

[patriciabt]

Is your enhancement related to a problem? Please describe.

"Event Federation Plugin for WordPress
Add ActivityPub to events created with most common WordPress event plugins"

Information here on event-federation page, see also more information

Let's make sure GatherPress is considered as one of the "most common WordPress event plugins" :)
Assign that ticket to myself to get in touch with them and see if there is anything to do on our side.

Designs

No response

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[patriciabt]

@carstingaxion
In the conversation on Mastodon, you wrote "And maybe to create the missing transformer for the #ActivityPub #event-federation is new on my list."
Can you elaborate here please!
Thanks a lot

[patriciabt]

Conversation on Mastodon with André Menrath, @Menrath here on GitHub , it might be done in the next weeks

[Menrath]

As GatherPress seems to be a community first project, I would also be interested in discussing federated event attendance (for example joining the event via an Mobilizon account) and notifications to attendies also via the fediverse. I already made some drafts but other major event plugins lack a clear API (missing or complex and not-documented).

[Menrath]

@patriciabt I asked some questions in the Pull Request #615 (comment). Could you maybe provide some guidance?

Another question is: Is the GatherPress Team interested in exploring more than just federating the event itself, e.g. making it possible for others to also make Join requests with their accounts/identities from other servers?

Currently GatherPress seems to heavily focus on the "allow user registration on your WordPress site" to have the full features. As I understand this is mostly used for handling attandees and sending messages to attendees. This could also be covered by ActivityPub. People could currently attend via Mobilizon or soon with Plemora profiles (there is a pending PR) and others. And messages could not only be send via mail, but also via ActivityPub to participants.

[patriciabt]

@mauteri could you please provide some guidance and see the above questions (and in #615), thanks a lot

[Menrath]

GatherPress ActivityPub Integration

General Remarks

The ActivityPub protocol's definition for events is somewhat vague and limited. To address this, a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal (FEP) is currently being developed under FEP-8a8e. It would be highly beneficial for GatherPress to support this proposal fully, as long as GatherPress offers certain features.

Reading through the FEP makes it clear what API functions GatherPress should offer in order to provide a feature-rich ActivityPub integration. Together with the below links of how the Event Bridge for ActivityPub realised basic ActivtyPub support it should be even more clear (to developers).

Outgoing Events

Outgoing events involve transforming a GatherPress event into an ActivityPub json-ld Event representation. Significant work has already been done in the Event Bridge for ActivityPub to handle this transformation.

Incoming Events

Incoming events refer to receiving events from federated networks and caching them locally. The Event Bridge for ActivityPub already demonstrates basic functionality for this, with security-reviewed sanitization and validation, as well as initial adjustments to the admin UI (e.g., preventing the editing of externally cached events). The current transmogrifier (importer of external events) in the Event Bridge for ActivityPub can be found here.

Some cherry-picked Ideas for Enhancements

• Location Handling: Consider whether locations, both virtual and physical, should be available outside the event's scope. This would allow locations to have a unique ID that can be fetched and updated independently (e.g., as a Custom Post Type or Custom Taxonomy). Note that the Admin UI should likely not allow the use of an external location from the federation in a local event. This is mainly to avoid duplication in the federation and allow more granular updates (Just sending an update of a Location, or re-using it). Examples of place transformers from other event plugins can be found here.

• Event Organizers: Introduce the concept of event organizers, as outlined in the FEP. This involves two main aspects:

  1. User-facing: When browsing an event list, searching, or viewing a cached external event, it should be clear who the event organizer and the origin (actor and URL) is.
  2. Flexible Organizer Model: The current assumption that the ActivityPub actor sending the event is the sole organizer is too limiting for real-world use cases. Support for multiple organizers should be considered.

• External Event Caching: The functionality for saving and updating external events as a cache in a local GatherPress instance should be simplified via API-like functions.

• Federated Joins: Refer to FEP-8a8e. GatherPress should provide an easy way to retrieve attendee information for events. This data should be externally resolvable (with permission-based filtering) via a query parameter. When the attendee collection changes, an action should trigger an update to ActivityPub, ensuring that only the attendee count is updated in the federation, rather than the entire event. Furthermore Gatherpress should be able to add attendees via an API, in that case this would be ActivityPub actors in that case. Note that the ActivityPub plugin is working on an generic way to store ActivityPub actors which would ease this.

• Better event search API: Making it easy for devs to filter and search events, including the criteria such as the ActivityPub origin, the before and after date, categories, location (geo and radius), etc... Currently writing complicated SQL is needed which might break easily, see here.

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@patriciabt Let's meet again online soon :)

[patriciabt]

@Menrath It was great meeting you IRL. And thanks for all the work to make GatherPress events "federatable" (is that a word? :D )
If you are available, let's meet this Friday at 15:00 CET/14:00 UTC/10:00 EDT
(it's 1 hour before the regular huddle which is still 11:00 for the American team as they are already in DST, and 16:00 CET/ 15:00 UTC)
with @mauteri if possible