Social Previews: Decode entities in post titles, excerpts, and descriptions

[sixhours]

Fixes #26760

Proposed changes:

• Run decodeEntities on post title & description before showing them in the Social Previews panel.
• Core seems to encode special characters in post meta while Jetpack does not.
• I'm posing this as a proof of concept because I'm concerned it's not as secure as it could be. I see we're using decodeEntities elsewhere in the plugin, so it's probably okay? But I wonder about the potential for XSS issues sneaking through. Answered in comments.

Before

After

Other information:

• Have you written new tests for your changes, if applicable?
• Have you checked the E2E test CI results, and verified that your changes do not break them?
• Have you tested your changes on WordPress.com, if applicable (if so, you'll see a generated comment below with a script to run)?

Jetpack product discussion

Does this pull request change what data or activity we track or use?

Testing instructions:

• Apply this patch to your sandbox and sandbox the API
• Create a new post in the editor on a Simple site with a Business plan. Ensure the post title and description include a special character like &
• Publish the post
• Go to the Jetpack toolbar
• Go to Social Previews
• Click Preview to see the modal
• The special characters should be rendered/decoded rather than showing as encoded (like &)

[github-actions]

Are you an Automattician? Please test your changes on all WordPress.com environments to help mitigate accidental explosions.

• To test on WoA, go to the Plugins menu on a WordPress.com Simple site. Click on the "Upload" button and follow the upgrade flow to be able to upload, install, and activate the Jetpack Beta plugin. Once the plugin is active, go to Jetpack > Jetpack Beta, select your plugin, and enable the fix/decode-entitles-title branch.

• To test on Simple, run the following command on your sandbox:

  bin/jetpack-downloader test jetpack fix/decode-entitles-title
  

Interested in more tips and information?

• In your local development environment, use the jetpack rsync command to sync your changes to a WoA dev blog.
• Read more about our development workflow here: PCYsg-eg0-p2
• Figure out when your changes will be shipped to customers here: PCYsg-eg5-p2

[github-actions]

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[manzoorwanijk]

I'm posing this as a proof of concept because I'm concerned it's not as secure as it could be. I see we're using decodeEntities elsewhere in the plugin, so it's probably okay? But I wonder about the potential for XSS issues sneaking through.

Thank you for considering that. Since the text is passed to and rendered by React components, it's safe to decode the HTML entities.

[sixhours]

FYI I'm on vacation next week. If this gets approved before I get back, please feel free to merge on my behalf!

[manzoorwanijk]

This looks good. Thank you for fixing it.