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).