How Outpost shapes a post

The composer’s tabs map onto a small set of rules. This page explains them so what lands on your site isn’t a surprise. It’s background, not setup — for step-by-step tasks see Common tasks.

What Outpost posts

Outpost writes posts — the standard WordPress post type. It does not write:

• Pages.
• Custom post types, unless the Micropub plugin on your site is configured to route there.
• Media outside the photo upload flow.
• Comments. A Reply is an h-entry on your own site that links to the page you’re replying to, not a comment left on that page.

Custom post types: Outpost speaks Micropub, and the Micropub plugin decides which post type a request lands on. By default that’s post. Routing to a custom type is a server-side filter on that plugin — Outpost doesn’t configure it; it talks to whatever the server accepts.

Post formats

Post formats are WordPress’s classification of a post as Status, Aside, Image, Gallery, Video, Audio, Quote, Link, or Standard. With the Post Formats for Block Themes companion active and Auto Post-Format inference enabled in the composer defaults (Settings), Outpost sets the format from what the post contains:

What the post carries	Format
like-of, repost-of, or bookmark-of	Link
One photo	Image
More than one photo	Gallery
listen-of	Audio
watch-of	Video
in-reply-to	Status
A note of 280 characters or fewer	Status
A longer note	Standard
An article (a titled post)	Standard
The Quote style	Quote

Block themes don’t opt into post formats on their own, which is why the companion gates both the format selector and this inference. Theme developers: the post formats reference covers add_theme_support().

The IndieWeb specs behind every post

Every post Outpost sends is built on these. Primers, if you want to see what a post looks like on the wire:

• Micropub — the posting protocol. The composer POSTs a form-encoded body with h=entry and the post’s properties (content, name, photo, in-reply-to, and so on) to your site’s Micropub endpoint, and gets back a Location header pointing at the new post.
• IndieAuth — the sign-in. The composer discovers your site’s authorization endpoint, sends you there to consent, exchanges the returned code for a bearer token, and stores that token encrypted in your browser.
• h-entry — the shape of a post: properties such as content, name (the title), photo, in-reply-to, like-of, and category. Every composer variant is a different combination of h-entry properties.
• h-card — the marker for a person or organization on a page. Outpost reads h-cards from Reply targets to show the page’s author in the reply context.
• h-cite — a citation. The Quote style’s source maps here.
• Microformats2 — the umbrella all the h-* shapes live under.
• Webmention — how replies, likes, and reposts on syndicated copies find their way back to your site. Outpost doesn’t implement it; your site does, through the Webmention plugin.

standard.site (AT Protocol)

standard.site is a community set of AT Protocol lexicons — the site.standard.* namespace — that describe a publication and its documents, so any app on the open network behind Bluesky can read a blog post as structured data rather than a scrape. Posts made with Outpost take part in it through the Post Kinds for IndieWeb companion:

• Reading, with no setup. When a post cites another page — a Reply, Like, Repost, Favorite, Bookmark, Read, Jam, or Wish — Post Kinds checks that page a few seconds after the post is saved. If it publishes a site.standard.document, the citation card shows the author’s own title, description, tags, publication, and date instead of a guess from the page’s Open Graph tags. You can also run the check by hand from the card’s Standard.site record panel in the editor. Public AT Protocol repositories answer without an account, so nothing is connected and nothing about you is sent beyond the request for the page you already linked.
• Publishing, through ATmosphere. With the ATmosphere plugin (2.1 or newer) connected to an AT Protocol account and its automatic cross-posting turned on, your own posts publish as standard.site documents and appear on Bluesky. Post Kinds supplies what ATmosphere can’t know on its own: which kinds publish by default — public content and public logs: notes, articles, photos, videos, audio, reviews, recipes, events, quotes, questions, crafts, listens, watches, reads, plays, eats, drinks, jams, replies, bookmarks, RSVPs, and issues — and which are opt-in — likes, reposts, favorites, follows, tags, check-ins, moods, wishes, acquisitions, weather, exercise, sleep, trips, and itineraries — set per site under Settings → Post Kinds → Integrations, or per post with ATmosphere’s own toggle, which always wins. It also derives a readable title for kinds that are intentionally untitled (“Listened to Range Life by Pavement”, “Checked in at Powell’s Books”), adds the kind as a document tag, and applies check-in privacy rules. A Standard.site column on the posts list shows each post as Published, Pending, or Off.

Because a post from the composer is an ordinary post with its kind already set, it follows the same rules as one written in the editor: an Outpost note or article publishes as a document by default, while an Outpost check-in or mood stays off the network unless you’ve opted that kind in.

XFN relationships

The relationship picker on Reply and Doing target URLs is XFN (XHTML Friends Network): a way to say how you know the person at the other end of a link — friend, met, colleague, contact, spouse, and the rest of the XFN 1.1 vocabulary. Outpost stores your choice with the post and applies it to the link.

The picker appears only when the Link Extension for XFN companion is active. Without it your theme isn’t reading the relationship values, so Outpost hides the picker rather than suggest it does something it doesn’t.