Hibira Realtime for WordPress

A WordPress plugin that makes a site update while people are looking at it, on Hibira, a hosted realtime service that speaks the Pusher Channels protocol:

• Live comments: approved comments appear for every reader, replies under their parent.
• Post updated notice: readers of a post get a Reload button when you update it.
• Readers now: "12 reading now" on posts, on presence channels.
• WooCommerce order status: the order received and view order pages follow status changes.
• Admin notices: new orders and comments awaiting approval, in wp-admin.

No Composer, no build step: the PHP side signs Hibira HTTP API calls itself (includes/class-hibira-client.php), and the browser side is pusher-js 8.6.0 plus assets/js/hibira.js. PHP 7.4+, WordPress 6.0+.

Install

In wp-admin, Plugins → Add New, search for Hibira Realtime and install it (wordpress.org/plugins/hibira). Or download hibira.zip from the latest release and use Upload Plugin. Go to Settings → Hibira, paste the app ID, key and secret from your app in the Hibira portal (the free plan is enough) and press Send a test event.

The secret can live in wp-config.php instead of the database:

define( 'HIBIRA_APP_ID', '...' );
define( 'HIBIRA_APP_KEY', '...' );
define( 'HIBIRA_APP_SECRET', '...' );
// define( 'HIBIRA_HOST', 'ws.hibira.io' );

Channels and events

Channel	Event	Sent when
hibira-post-{ID}	comment-approved	a comment on the post is approved
hibira-post-{ID}	post-updated	the published post's title or content changes
presence-hibira-post-{ID}	(members)	readers open the post; the member count is "reading now"
private-hibira-order-{ID}	status	the WooCommerce order status changes
private-hibira-admin-comments	comment-pending	a comment awaits approval
private-hibira-admin-orders	new-order	a checkout creates an order

POST /wp-json/hibira/v1/auth signs private and presence subscriptions. Readers-now members are u{user ID} or v{random ID kept in the browser} with no user info. An order channel lets in the order's customer, shop managers, or a guest with the order key from the order received URL.

For developers

// Send your own events (up to 100 channels; data up to 4 KB on the free plan, 10 KB on paid plans).
hibira_trigger( 'scores', 'goal', array( 'team' => 'home' ) );

// Or, without failing when the plugin is off:
do_action( 'hibira_trigger', 'scores', 'goal', array( 'team' => 'home' ) );

// Decide your own private and presence channels.
add_filter( 'hibira_authorize_channel', function ( $decision, $channel, $user ) {
	if ( 'private-team-chat' === $channel ) {
		return user_can( $user, 'edit_posts' );
	}
	if ( 'presence-editors' === $channel && user_can( $user, 'edit_posts' ) ) {
		return array( 'user_id' => (string) $user->ID, 'user_info' => array( 'name' => $user->display_name ) );
	}
	return $decision;
}, 10, 3 );

// Enqueue the 'hibira' script handle (after hibira_register_client_script()).
HibiraWP.pusher().subscribe('scores').bind('goal', (data) => console.log(data));
HibiraWP.toast('Goal!');

Filters: hibira_live_post (turn live features off per post), hibira_comment_payload (what a live comment carries), hibira_authorize_channel. Action: hibira_trigger_failed.

Develop

php tests/run.php   # HTTP API signing, channel auth, requests (no WordPress needed)
phpcs               # WordPress coding standards (phpcs.xml.dist)

Strings are in languages/hibira.pot. The plugin does not ship .po/.mo files: WordPress.org builds and delivers them from translate.wordpress.org. translations/ keeps our 繁體中文, 简体中文, 日本語, 한국어, ไทย and Tiếng Việt .po files for importing there; they are left out of the plugin zip. CI runs the tests on PHP 7.4–8.4, PHPCS and the WordPress Plugin Check.

Release

Bump Version in hibira.php and Stable tag in readme.txt, then publish a GitHub Release tagged v<version>. Two workflows run: release attaches hibira.zip, and wporg-deploy commits the same files to the WordPress.org SVN repo (trunk/, tags/<version>/, and .wordpress-org/ → assets/). It needs the SVN_PASSWORD repository secret. To update only the banner or icons, run wporg-deploy by hand from the Actions tab.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later, like WordPress. pusher-js (assets/vendor) is MIT.