The big three are:

1. It is installable, ie it appears on the phone home screen, this gives it a massive advantage over a traditional website in ensuring ongoing user interaction.
2. An app is fast, ie it is faster to load and interact with than a traditional website.
3. It can send notifications, again this increases user interaction substantially.

Obviously these are not the only reasons but they are the major ones.

Now here is the kicker, you can get all the above features on a website on the majority of phones right now! Goodbye native apps and welcome to the world of progressive web apps.

What is a progressive web app (PWA), you may ask? Well at it is heart it is just a website with some additional features. Those features enable all three of the advantages I outlined above on the majority of smart phones worldwide, right now!! But being a website a PWA also has some massive advantages. They include:

1. They are linkable, ie you can access them by opening a URL.
2. They are much easier to build, after all they are just a website with some substantial enhancements.
3. They are updatable, ie any changes can occur as soon as the PWA is accessed (as opposed to waiting for a user to download a new version of a native app).
4. Being on the web they are cross platform.

Lets look at the state of play on different phones:

On android phones which now constitute the majority of smart phones worldwide all of the above advantages are currently already available to progressive web apps. ie visitors will be prompted to instal your website on the phone (provided it meets the PWA criteria) right now and that website if properly designed will be fast and be able to send notifications

For apple  the situation is not quite so good. Yes you can install a web app but the installation experience not obvious and there is no ability to send notifications. The good news is that but in the upcoming IOS version (IOS 12.2) there will be significant improvement. Once installed on your phone a well built progressive web app will behave like its native counterpart, with the only issue that it will not be able to send notifications. But that functionality is coming.

Update: since March 2023 IOS supports push notification for those running PWAs on IOS 16.4 or later.

So in conclusion is that unless you need certain hardware apis that are not supported by PWA´s yet or you desperately need notifications on Apple phones then you should find a web developer who can enhance your existing website to become a PWA. The future is PWA´s and the future (to a large extent) is already here.

I built this plugin as UI needed this flexibility whilst using WordPress as a CMS. The plugin adds a new post status that enables posts and pages (and custom post types) to be archived. Archiving in this context means that the content is still publicly available but is not published on the front page of the site or the feed. I was not satisfied with other archiving solutions which hid the content for all non logged in visitors and was not configurable.

Posts are available directly for any visitor but can have a custom message added that flags that they may no longer be relevant.

WordPress’ default post statuses currently work very much like an on/off switch as far as a finished post is concerned. Of the eight default statuses, Published is the only one that is public, while all the rest remain behind the curtain in various states of unreadiness. None of the statuses, apart from Published, adequately indicate that a post is complete or finished or its relevancy.

Fortunately, WordPress makes it possible for developers to register their own custom post statuses, which is what I’ve done with this plugin. It allows you to archive posts in the same way that you might archive email.

Archived Post Status is compatible with posts, pages, and custom post types, giving you a wide array of possible use cases:

• Archive pages or posts from a conference or event for editing and re-use next year
• Archive real estate listings for records
• Cycle portfolio content in and out of the site as necessary
• Temporarily remove listings from a site that indexes businesses or organizations
• Archive products to bring back for future use

While custom post types seem to be one of the most likely uses for this plugin, you may not want to have the archived status available to all post types. Thisd can be done by slecting the appropriate posts types in the settings area.

If you need to public archive completed posts, but hide them from the front page, feeds, and flag their state this simple plugin will do the trick. Installation instructions etc are available here:
https://lhero.org/portfolio/lh-archived-post-status/

Instead I think the area where Worpress has dropped the ball is that sensible projects that could make its so much better are not being tackled, instead development seems to be based on UI improvements and quick wins. These are great but a better WordPress platform would make these sort of improvements easier. Indeed a better platform would enable people to build their own UI. Thus rendering the rolling MP6 (and similar initiatives) into the core moot (because developers would be rolling their own version of the dashboard through plugins).

Things like backpress, post to post relationships in core, or cleaning up the ridiculous wp db schema are not being tackled. These projects would make wp a better cms AND a better blogging engine. But they are not on the roadmap.

You can bet wp’s competitors are tacklings these sort of issues

Barnaby you wrote:

The evidence is against you here, as almost all known usage of webmention has been for short replies which don’t make sense without context.

Actually we aren’t disagreeing, maybe I didn’t express myself well when I wrote “At the moment of the method is built around a POSSE architecture. This works well for long form articles which can stand alone but address issues or ideas that are posted on an external website”.

What i meant to say is that Indieweb replies make no sense outside their context which makes it counterintuitive to be posting them and displaying them via POSSE. Of course it can be done (and I like the concept) but i doubt it will catch on. Whereas a long form artcicle replying to another doesn’t really need the context as it stands alone.

I agree that webmention is nicer than pingback and your work on the toolbelt is awesome.

With respect to my external comment idea, there is no security hole, most commenting systems allow commenting without logging in and it is up to server on whether it accepts the webmention of the comment posted. Finally like webmentions itself it is a chicken and an egg thing whether PESOS webmentions would catch on. Without modifying existing implemenations it won’t work. I’m slowly getting the hang of Github so I might fork Matthias’ plugin and build it myself if I find the time.

However thinking about the architecture of of webmentions I think they could be extended by becoming bidirectional. At the moment of the method is built around a POSSE architecture. This works well for long form articles which can stand alone but address issues or ideas that are posted on an external website. But if that is all there is to webmentions it is just a nicer implementation of Pingback.

More importantly though webmentions vision includes distributed commenting and it does succeed at making this possible, and members of the community are making use of this functionality. However the current workflow is awkward and i doubt it will catch on with the general public. Sophisticated Indieweb users can and will read an article on an external site and then return to their own to post a comment, but that king of behaviour is not intuitive.

But all is no lost as the webmention protocol could easily be implemented to support PESOS, which when commenting is more much natural. This is best explained by illustrating a use case namely:

A commenter (for this example me) arrives at external site, reads an article and wishes to make a comment. I make the comment on the external site and as part of making the comment I add my author url, that being the url of my own site. The external site then sends a webmention of the comment to my site. My own site could then scrapes my comment and saves a copy in my CMS. Otionall I could republish the comment in my blog or activity feed at my discretion. Thus fully implementing PESOS.

This article is hopefully also posted on IndieNews. Also mentioning Barnaby Walters for good order.