Webhooks

Webhooks lets you easily develop push notifications. This push notification is simply a HTTP POST, that is triggered by some action. This is a feature aimed for developers who want to get data from actions (like when a new comment is submitted) that occur on a blog. Only admin level users can add or manage webhooks.

The instructions from this guide are referring to the WP Admin dashboard. You can get to this dashboard by adding /wp-admin to the end of your site’s url (e.g.: example.wordpress.com/wp-admin)

Note: The Webhook settings mentioned on this page do not apply to Business Plan sites using plugins. Various plugins offer similar functionality.

You can find this feature under Settings -> Webhooks in the dashboard.

Add a Webhook

You can add a webhook by clicking the Add webhook button and filling out a simple form.

You can choose an action and the fields associated with that action to be posted to the URL. The URL will receive an HTTP POST request when the selected action fires. The post data will contain the selected fields and one additional field called hook, that contains the action title.

You can edit, delete and activate or deactivate the webhook using the options in the webhook row.

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Possible Actions/Fields

Action		Description		Fields
comment_post		Runs just after a comment is saved in the database		comment_ID, comment_agent, comment_approved, comment_author, comment_author_IP, comment_author_email, comment_author_url, comment_content, comment_date, comment_date_gmt, comment_karma, comment_parent, comment_post_ID, comment_type, user_id
publish_page		Runs when a page is published, or if it is edited and its status is “published”		ID, comment_count, comment_status, guid, menu_order, ping_status, pinged, post_author, post_category, post_content, post_content_filtered, post_date, post_date_gmt, post_excerpt, post_mime_type, post_modified, post_modified_gmt, post_name, post_parent, post_password, post_status, post_title, post_type, post_url, to_ping
publish_post		Runs when a post is published, or if it is edited and its status is “published”		ID, comment_count, comment_status, guid, menu_order, ping_status, pinged, post_author, post_category, post_content, post_content_filtered, post_date, post_date_gmt, post_excerpt, post_mime_type, post_modified, post_modified_gmt, post_name, post_parent, post_password, post_status, post_title, post_type, post_url, to_ping

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What would I use something like this for?

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.

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