We have added the really cool plugin developed by mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine) called HookPress. HookPress lets you add webhooks to WordPress, providing an easy way to develop push notifications when various events happen on your blog (like publishing a post for instance).

WebhooksYou can now find this under the Settings Module in the dashboard.

As part of the process of integrating HookPress into WordPress.com we trimmed back some of the features (to ensure it didn’t impact performance or security) while improving other aspects of the plugin, like the management interface. To guide you through the rigs and roles of setting up and developing with this new tool check out the Webhooks support page.

There are currently three actions that you can enable a hook for: comment_post, publish_post, and publish_page. We’ll be adding support for more hooks in the future.

So what does all this mean? Well, for starters this is one of those features targeted at developers. Let’s look at a hypothetical example; say I want to get a text message every time a new comment is submitted to my site. First you need to setup a URL that will accept an HTTP POST request with the comment data and then does all of the heavy lifting of taking that data and shipping it off to your phone in the form of a text message. Then you add a new hook via the Webhooks section of the admin area for the ‘comment_post’ action, selecting which fields you want and the URL that you setup earlier. That’s all there is to it, WordPress.com will automatically send an HTTP POST with the fields you selected to the URL you configured for each comment that is submitted. A contrived example to be sure, but it gives you an idea of what the process looks like.

Another big thank you to mitcho for all his brilliant work on this super cool plugin and look forward to seeing what people do with this!