Daymark

Personal Site Publisher Mode for WordPress.

Mission: Make publishing to your own WordPress site feel as joyful, immediate, and effortless as posting to the best mobile social apps, while ensuring everything you create remains yours.

Overview

Daymark is a phone-first publishing experience for WordPress — a "Personal Site Publisher Mode" that makes posting to your own site as fast as a social app. A logged-in user visits /daymark, picks media from the camera roll or types a note, optionally runs AI Assist, and publishes a standard WordPress post. The site stays the canonical source of truth; social networks are optional, additive destinations.

Every Mark is a normal post — no custom post type — so your content stays portable and works with standard themes, feeds, comments, and exports. Around that, Daymark adds:

• a mobile app shell at /daymark, installable to the home screen as a PWA;
• a REST API for creating and listing Marks;
• optional AI Assist for captions, tags, and per-image alt text via the WordPress 7.0 AI Client (no provider, no AI UI — and publishing never depends on it);
• conversation backflow that brings social replies back as native WordPress comments and surfaces them in an in-app notifications screen.

Publishing outward happens through the WordPress plugins you already trust — publicize-style and federation plugins — rather than Daymark reimplementing network APIs. See the FAQ for how that works.

Extending Daymark? The full action and filter reference is published at https://jeffpaul.github.io/daymark/.

Requirements

• WordPress 7.0+ (the bundled AI Client powers optional AI Assist; publishing never requires a configured AI provider)
• PHP 8.1+

Using Daymark Like a Phone App

Activate the plugin, then visit /daymark on a phone-sized viewport while logged in:

wp plugin activate daymark

Daymark is designed to sit on your phone's home screen like a native app. The URL pattern is always:

https://[yoursite]/daymark

For example: https://example.com/daymark (log in first, or you will be redirected to the WordPress login screen and then back to Daymark).

iOS (Safari)

1. Open https://[yoursite]/daymark in Safari.
2. Tap the Share button.
3. Tap Add to Home Screen.
4. Confirm the name "Daymark" and tap Add.

Android (Chrome)

1. Open https://[yoursite]/daymark in Chrome.
2. Tap the ⋮ menu.
3. Tap Add to Home Screen (or Install App when Chrome offers it).

What to expect

• The home-screen icon launches Daymark as a browser shortcut. Full standalone display (display: standalone in the manifest, no browser chrome) requires HTTPS.
• Local demo note: the local dev site (http://wp70.local) is HTTP-only, so iOS will open the shortcut in regular Safari and Chrome will not offer "Install App". That is expected for local demos — on any HTTPS site the same URL installs as a standalone app.
• A conservative service worker (assets/daymark-sw.js, cache daymark-v1, scope limited to the plugin assets/ directory) caches only the app's static app.css and app.js. It never caches REST responses, nonces, HTML, media, or anything under /wp-admin/. There is no offline publishing mode.

FAQ

How do I publish to social networks?

A Mark is a standard WordPress post, so the leanest path is to let a publishing plugin you already trust share it. Daymark is built to cooperate with those rather than reimplement them:

• Publicize-style plugins (Jetpack Social, Share on Mastodon, ATmosphere, XPoster, Autoshare for Twitter, …) already share your Daymark when it publishes. Daymark detects them and shows an awareness note on the publish screen. For plugins that expose a per-post control, Daymark turns that into an in-app on/off toggle per Mark — currently Share on Mastodon, Autoshare for Twitter, and ATmosphere (for Bluesky, when it's connected and auto-publishing).
• Federation plugins (ActivityPub, ATmosphere, Webmention) make your site itself the account; replies they receive land as native WordPress comments and appear in Daymark notifications automatically (see below).

Daymark also keeps an open connector interface (daymark_register_connectors) so a plugin can register a first-class destination — appearing on the publish screen and syndicating through Daymark's own pipeline, with replies imported via daymark_import_network_responses — without any change to Daymark core. No such connector ships in this repo; the hook is the integration point.

If nothing is set up, "Your Site" is simply the only destination — publishing to your own site always works, and everything social is additive.

Why don't I see any social networks on the publish screen?

Daymark only offers destinations that can actually publish (and pull replies back): a network appears once a connector plugin registers it as a destination. With nothing connected, "Your Site" is the only destination — publishing to your own site always works; social networks are strictly additive. The same rule applies to AI: the AI Assist button only appears when a WordPress AI provider is actually configured. (Publicize-style plugins are separate — they show up as the awareness note or a per-Mark toggle, described above, not as destinations.)

When connectors are present, Daymark remembers your routing habits per Mark type: once you publish, say, an image Mark to a specific set of networks, the next image Mark preselects the same set (per user).

How are Marks filed into categories?

The publish screen has a File under picker for your site's existing categories. Like destinations, the choice is remembered per Mark type — file image Marks under "Photos" once and the next image Mark preselects it (per user) — and you can change it for any single Mark. The picker only appears when your site has categories beyond its default one; otherwise Marks file into the default category as usual. Selections are validated against your existing categories (Daymark never creates new ones) and stored natively, so they behave like any other post's categories.

What social network connectors could work?

Daymark's adapter layer (daymark_register_connectors + daymark_import_network_responses) is open to any network. Feasibility by platform:

The pattern is consistent: open protocols (AT, ActivityPub) are weekend-sized connectors; platforms with app-review gates are projects.

Do ActivityPub, ATmosphere, or Webmention work with Daymark?

Yes — they're the push-based way replies come back. Those plugins deliver social replies as native WordPress comments, which is exactly Daymark's backflow storage, so replies they import appear in Daymark notifications automatically — labeled with honest source context (Daymark recognizes each plugin's comment markers):

There are two identity models, and both are valid: a publicize-style plugin posts a copy to your personal account on the network, while ActivityPub/ATmosphere make your site itself the account (people follow your domain; replies arrive by push, live, no syncing). Reactions (likes/reposts) that those plugins store as comments are kept out of Daymark notifications — replies only.

Daymark also renders IndieWeb u-syndication markup on Mark posts ("Also on: …" links to the syndicated copies), which is what Bridgy needs to backfeed replies from those copies as webmentions — so publicize-style syndication and webmention backfeed compose.

Every Mark's own permalink page carries full outbound h-entry/h-card microformats2 markup too, and Users → Your Profile has a rel=me field that renders as a rel="me" link next to your h-card — so IndieWeb tools (readers, IndieAuth, Bridgy) can read a Mark correctly without any of this plugin's own APIs.

Replying to a subscribed post works the same way. Tap "Reply" on an expanded Timeline card and Daymark opens the composer seeded to that post — write your reply, publish it as a normal Mark, done. The published Mark's permalink carries a u-in-reply-to link to the source, and if you have the Webmention plugin installed and active, it notifies the source automatically the moment your reply goes live — Daymark itself never sends, receives, or verifies a Webmention; it just makes sure the markup a Webmention plugin looks for is there. For the best Daymark + IndieWeb experience, install Webmention (and ActivityPub/ATmosphere, per the table above) so replies and mentions from across the web show up in your Notifications automatically. Settings -> Daymark's Connectors tab lists all three with an Install/Activate button right there, so you don't need to leave wp-admin to set any of them up.

Don't want to install the ActivityPub plugin at all? Bridgy Fed (a different project from the classic Bridgy above, despite the name) is a free, hosted bridge rather than a plugin: it gives your site a fediverse and Bluesky presence through the same Webmention support, translating your posts into ActivityPub/AT Protocol activities and replies/likes/reposts back into webmentions your site already knows how to receive. The tradeoff versus the ActivityPub plugin is identity — Bridgy Fed bridges you in under an auto-generated handle on its own domain (@yourdomain@web.brid.gy), while the ActivityPub plugin gives your site its own native handle on your own domain — so most sites want one or the other, not both. It's listed on the Connectors tab too, right alongside the plugin options.

Does Daymark work with the Friends plugin?

Yes. If you already follow someone through the Friends plugin, subscribing to their site in Daymark reads their posts straight from Friends' own cache instead of independently re-fetching their site a second time — Friends already does the real fetching, parsing, and post-format classification for a friend, so Daymark just reuses it. This only ever applies to a friend you've already added in Friends' own UI; Daymark doesn't add friends on Friends' behalf, and a site Friends doesn't yet follow subscribes exactly as it always has (via its RSS/Atom feed, WordPress REST API, or microformats2 markup).

I already run a social auto-poster (Jetpack Social, XPoster, …). Does it work with Daymark?

Yes, automatically — because a Mark is a standard WordPress post. Any "publicize"-style plugin that shares posts when they publish already shares your Marks the same way; Daymark neither drives nor blocks it.

So Daymark doesn't need to reimplement that. Instead, when it detects one of these active, the publish screen adds a small note — "Your site's publishing tools will also share this Mark, per their own settings: …" — so you know your Mark is going out that way too. Daymark reads only whether the plugin is active; it never calls or configures it, and each plugin still shares according to its own settings and per-post controls.

Detected out of the box: Jetpack Social, ATmosphere, Autoblue, Share on Mastodon, XPoster, Autoshare for Twitter, Blog2Social, Social Networks Auto-Poster (SNAP), and Revive Old Posts. Other publishing plugins can add themselves to the note via the daymark_publish_helper_plugins filter.

Can I turn a plugin's sharing on or off per Mark?

For plugins that expose a public per-post control hook, yes — Daymark turns the awareness note into an actual per-Mark toggle on the publish screen. Currently that's Share on Mastodon (via its share_on_mastodon_enabled filter) and Autoshare for Twitter (via autoshare_for_twitter_enabled_default). The toggle defaults to off (opt-in), and Daymark drives each plugin only through its own public hook — it never writes the plugin's private data. A Mark that opts in publishes through the plugin's normal flow when it goes live.

Adapters are registered through the daymark_publish_helper_adapters filter, so a plugin (or a companion add-on) can make itself controllable by mapping a toggle to its own per-post hook. Plugins that don't yet expose such a hook stay awareness-only until they do — the right fix there is an upstream hook, not Daymark writing private meta.

One thing to watch: if you run both a Mark connector for a network and one of these plugins for the same network, a Mark can post twice. The note is there partly to make that visible — turn one of them off for that network if you don't want the duplicate.

Which AI providers power which Daymark features?

Daymark never talks to an AI vendor directly — it goes through the WordPress 7.0 AI Client, so any configured provider plugin powers all of AI Assist. Configure exactly one (or several — the first configured provider is used):

Feature-by-feature: caption suggestion rewrites your draft text (or proposes one from the media context) and tag suggestions propose post tags — both from the AI Assist sheet, with accepted tags applied as real post tags at publish. Alt text works differently: every image in the composer gets its own alt field, pre-filled from the actual image via a vision call to the AI Client and editable before you publish (when no provider is configured the field is simply empty to fill in by hand). All of it is optional: no provider, no AI UI, and publishing never depends on it.

What does Daymark quietly capture, and can I turn it off?

Composing a Mark quietly captures a few pieces of metadata in the background, without any field to fill in: the date/time it was created, your device's location (only if your browser grants permission — never a form field to fill in), current weather for that location, camera details from a photo's own EXIF data (camera model, aperture, ISO, and similar), an estimated reading time for a longer caption, and AI-suggested tags. None of it is required, none of it can block or delay publishing, and anything that isn't available (permission denied, no EXIF data, no AI provider configured, etc.) is simply left out rather than causing an error.

Weather is the one piece that talks to an external service on its own: composing near a captured location makes one request to Open-Meteo (api.open-meteo.com), a free, keyless service — chosen for the same reason Daymark never stores an AI provider API key. Everything else (location, camera metadata, reading time, tags) stays entirely between your browser and your own site.

This is captured ahead of planned future work: showing where a Mark was made ("checkins"), its weather at the time, and richer photo details, directly in the Timeline. Location and weather aren't shown anywhere in Daymark yet — they're captured now so that display work has real data to build on rather than starting from a Timeline with nothing to show. If you'd rather this wasn't captured at all while it's still invisible, location, weather, and camera metadata can each be turned off independently from the Privacy section of Settings -> Daymark — no code required.

A developer can also set the same defaults from code, which still wins over the Settings -> Daymark checkboxes:

add_filter( 'daymark_capture_location', '__return_false' );
add_filter( 'daymark_capture_weather', '__return_false' );
add_filter( 'daymark_capture_camera_metadata', '__return_false' );

Turning off location capture also stops the weather lookup, since weather is only ever attempted alongside a resolved location; the weather toggle/filter alone leaves location capture on but skips just the weather lookup. A Mark's captured location is stored for your own site's use and is never published on its public permalink page unless you explicitly opt in — either the "Publish location publicly" checkbox in the same Privacy section, or add_filter( 'daymark_publish_location_publicly', '__return_true' ); from code.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup, the test suites, coding standards, and the pull-request workflow.

AI-assisted development

This plugin was generated with Claude Code working from the Project Daymark specification documents, with human guidance, review, and testing throughout — every build phase was gated on verification against a live WordPress site, and the test suites (PHPUnit, WP-CLI smoke, browser E2E) exist to keep that review honest. Treat it as an AI-generated, human-directed software.