We use the Webmention plugin for WordPress to accept and send Webmentions. This is why I took the time to figure out how to add pingback/trackback support to pages even though we do not accept regular pingbacks and trackbacks (see guide and older post). At the moment, comments are disabled on every post except the Guestbook (largely for maintenance reasons). I made an interesting discovery while configuring our Guestbook.
The Webmention plugin has an option to add a little Webmention box beneath the WordPress comment form. You can see it in action on the Guestbook (note, however, that the Webmention will not work if it cannot find enough information on the page). Now if comments are disabled, the Webmention box will not appear because it is tied to the comments form. However, there is an exception. I installed the Advanced Comments Form plugin to modify our comment form without fiddling with our functions.php. This plugin modifies the appearance and fields of the WordPress comments form but uses WordPress’s default commenting system. Advanced comments form comes with its own comment box block which is different than the default WordPress comments block. Now if I enable the default WordPress comments widget on a post where comments are disabled, users will see nothing. However, let me demonstrate what happens when I add the block to this post with comments disabled.
The Webmention box appears. The text which normally goes with it (see Guestbook for example) and the actual comment form do not. Very interesting. If you found this post interesting and you are posting from a site which either supports sending Webmentions, your post should appear here. If you are posting from a site which does not support sending webmentions, you can punch the URL of the page which links here into that box and see if a webmention goes through.