22. Providing External Posts

TermConnect contributes related posts from configured peer sites and feeds to any same-site consumer that asks HyperTaxonomy for a term’s external posts — for example, WP-SKOS’s document-search endpoint. No configuration is required, and TermConnect does not depend on or reference any specific consumer.

The contract is HyperTaxonomy’s generic term API, the same pattern TermConnect already uses for term URIs:

• Provider (TermConnect) hooks HyperTaxonomy’s htax_term_external_posts filter (TC_HT_Integration::provide_term_external_posts, includes/integration/class-hypertaxonomy-integration.php).
• Consumer reads htax_get_term_external_posts( $term_id, $args ). The consumer never references TermConnect; TermConnect never references the consumer.
• HyperTaxonomy owns visibility: the getter returns [] for a term hidden from the current user and does not even fire the provider filter. (When HyperTaxonomy is not active, there is no external-posts API and this integration is inert.)

For a given term, TermConnect runs its full collection (the same core behind [tc_peer_posts], see Peer Fetch API) scoped to that one concept term: explicit per-term peer links (_tc_link_{slug}), shared-identifier and synonym auto-matching, RSS/Atom feeds, and — when requested — FOAF discovery. It returns plain normalized post arrays (the tc_external_normalize_post shape: url, title, excerpt, date_gmt, modified_gmt, thumbnail_url, origin, score, …). Converting those into a consumer-specific shape (e.g. foaf:Document JSON-LD) is the consumer’s job.

Scope hints ($args)

HyperTaxonomy forwards an opaque $args bag to the provider; TermConnect honors:

Key	Default	Meaning
platforms	all supported (wordpress, feed)	Peer platform types to include.
foaf_depth	0 (direct peers only)	FOAF traversal depth; >0 opts into FOAF.
peers	(all)	Restrict to specific peer link-type slugs. Consumers that should not expose the peer topology (e.g. WP-SKOS) simply leave this unset.
per_page	20	Fetch-size hint.

Auto-matching (shared identifier + synonyms) is always applied for peers; it is not a separate toggle. Origin validation and the site blacklist apply throughout.