BoxCart – Local Pickup & Click and Collect Ordering vs OpenStation

BoxCart is a standalone click and collect ordering plugin for WordPress. Give your customers a polished pickup-ordering experience with configurable time slots, a modern card-view storefront, customer accounts, and a built-in admin dashboard – all without WooCommerce. Whether you call it local pickup, click and collect, store pickup, or order ahead, it is the same idea: customers order online and collect in person, at a time that suits them. BoxCart handles the whole flow, from storefront to time slots to order management, without the weight of a full e-commerce platform. Built for: farm shops, bakeries, butchers, delis, greengrocers, fishmongers, florists, coffee roasters, pizza shops, meal-prep kitchens, and any business where customers order ahead and collect. What you get in the free build Click & collect ordering with configurable time slots on your pickup schedule. One pickup location with its own address, collection instructions, opening hours, and per-slot capacity. Card-view storefront with category filters, search, and mini-basket. Sell by unit, weight, or pack – offer multiple quantity options per product, such as single units, 500g, 1kg, or a 6-pack. Customer accounts with order history, plus optional up-front registration. Admin order management with a status lifecycle (pending, processing, ready, completed, cancelled). Order export to CSV from the orders screen, filtered by date, status, and location. Transactional email templates (order confirmation and status updates) with branding controls and a live preview editor. Plus a new-order admin notification. Cash on collection and bank transfer payment methods. 5 Gutenberg blocks and 5 shortcodes for embedding BoxCart anywhere – products, basket, checkout, account, mini basket. Developer-friendly – 50+ action hooks and 35 filter hooks, CSS custom properties throughout, zero external PHP dependencies. Cache-resilient – pages render as empty shells that hydrate via AJAX, with a bypass cookie for customer sessions. Compatible with Cloudflare, WP Rocket, LiteSpeed, and similar. Translation-ready with a .pot file included. GDPR-aware – self-hosted fonts, optional full data cleanup on uninstall. Why BoxCart? Standalone – no WooCommerce required. A single, focused plugin with its own data model. Time-slot ordering baked in. Configure your schedule, slot length, and capacity. Customers see live availability. Developer extensible – documented hooks, filters, and CSS custom properties. Not a stripped-down demo – the free build is a complete, working click & collect store. Paid Pro upgrade (optional) A paid Pro build is available from boxcart.dev with additional features: Multiple pickup locations Stripe card payments (with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Link, Klarna, PayPal, Afterpay) Table-view storefront Members-only pricing (hide prices and the add-to-cart button from logged-out visitors) Customer favourites and one-click reorder Two-way order messaging Customer-side order modification Holiday closures and per-date capacity overrides Printable pick lists & packing slips Sales reports CSV product & category import/export 195+ customisation settings Pro is optional – the free build will continue to receive updates and is genuinely useful on its own. Live demo Three demo stores at demo.boxcart.dev – a greengrocer, a bakery, and a butcher – each configured differently to show the range of what BoxCart can do. Documentation Full documentation at docs.boxcart.dev covering every admin workflow and the developer API. External Services This plugin uses the Freemius plugin framework (https://freemius.com/) for optional anonymous usage tracking, licence handling for the paid Pro upgrade, and update delivery for Pro customers. Freemius is a well-known WordPress plugin distribution platform and the integration is entirely standard. What data is sent, and when: When you activate BoxCart, you are shown an opt-in prompt asking whether to share anonymous usage diagnostics. You can skip the prompt – the plugin works either way. If you opt in, Freemius receives: your site URL, admin email, WordPress version, PHP version, plugin version, activation/deactivation events, and non-personal environment data (e.g. active theme, locale). You can opt out at any time from BoxCart → Account. If you purchase the Pro upgrade, Freemius also handles your licence key, renewal state, and update delivery for the Pro build. BoxCart never sends your customers’ data, your orders, your products, or the contents of your store to Freemius or anywhere else. Endpoints contacted: api.freemius.com, wp.freemius.com. Freemius’s own privacy policy and terms: https://freemius.com/privacy/ https://freemius.com/terms/

wp-admin forgets. OpenStation doesn’t. You know the moment. You’re deep in a post and you need one image from the Media Library. You click over, find it, click back, and everything you had going is gone. Your scroll position, your half-typed thought, the three other things you had queued up in your head. That’s not a bug you hit. That’s the design. wp-admin shows you one screen at a time, and every navigation throws the last one away. It has worked this way since 2003, like a fridge that empties itself every time you close the door. WordPress has rebuilt almost everything else. The editor, the site editor, the patterns, the styles. The admin’s one-screen-at-a-time model is the layer nobody touched. OpenStation touches it. Install it and admin screens become draggable, resizable windows. Edit a post while the Media Library sits open next to it. Drag an image from one window straight into the other. Keep comments open in the corner. Reload the browser and your window layout — open pages, positions, sizes, and window states — comes back where you left it. OpenStation itself is free, GPL, and opt-in per user. One click in the admin bar turns it on for you. One click turns it off. Nobody else on your site sees anything change, and deactivating the plugin restores the classic admin exactly. No Core patches and no lock-in. Optional AI providers may charge for their service. Built and maintained by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, and Tumblr. Work on more than one thing at once Admin pages open as windows, including pages added by most other plugins. Drag them, resize them, snap them, tile them, minimize them to a taskbar. The admin menu becomes a dock of icons. Two editors open at once is one click away. Never lose your place Moving between open windows leaves each page in place. Across reloads, OpenStation remembers your open pages, window positions, sizes and states, virtual desktops, and focus. Closing a window with unsaved changes warns you first. A desk you can actually put things on Drop posts, media, and links right onto the wallpaper. Sort them into folders. Trash them to a Trash that actually holds things. The stuff you’re working on this week can just sit out where you can see it. One desktop per job Virtual desktops, the way your operating system does them. One for writing. One for the store. One for comment triage. One for that redesign you keep poking at. Switch between them without closing anything. Find anything with Cmd+K The full WordPress command palette, plus slash commands from your plugins, all under one keystroke. Turn on the optional AI assistant and you can ask it things like “which post had the comment asking for the recipe?” and it searches your own content to answer. (Requires an AI provider configured in Settings → Connectors on WordPress 7.0+. Details under “External services” below.) See how your site fits together The Corkboard is an interactive, zoomable map of how your posts, pages, and products link to each other. Pan around it. Find the orphans. Find the hubs. Running a store? Orders, Products, Coupons, and Customers become browsable folders with stock and sale ribbons. Open a customer to see their lifetime spend and what they buy most. Follow a product to its buyers, or a coupon to who redeemed it. Make it yours Wallpapers, from color presets to animated scenes to your own photo. Live widgets pinned to the desktop: drafts, stats, recent comments, a focus timer. Uploadable desktop themes, including a built-in Legacy theme that brings the old WordPress blue back in one click. And Mio, a soft-body desk companion that drifts across your wallpaper and gets bumped around by your windows. Off by default. You’ll turn it on. For developers Extend OpenStation through documented PHP and JavaScript APIs. Register windows, icons, wallpapers, widgets, commands, and settings tabs through stable openstation_register_* PHP APIs and a typed JavaScript API; customize dock items through documented hooks; add AI tools with the WordPress Abilities API. Copy-paste examples live in the developer docs on GitHub. External services No external service is required for OpenStation’s desktop interface. The optional AI Assistant and two user-initiated enrichment features make the external requests described below. AI Assistant The optional AI Assistant sends data to the AI provider you configure in WordPress’s Settings → Connectors (for example OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google). Generation is routed through WordPress 7.0’s built-in AI Client, which supplies the credentials stored in Connectors. The plugin never handles an API key itself. With no provider configured in Connectors, no external AI requests are made. When the AI Assistant is enabled and a user invokes it (via Cmd+K or the slash-command palette): What is sent: the user’s prompt, the conversation history for the active session, and tool-call metadata. The plugin’s built-in tools (search_posts, search_pages, search_comments) run WordPress’s native keyword search and may include excerpts of the matching posts/pages/comments in tool results, which are then sent back to the provider as part of the agentic loop. When it is sent: on user-initiated AI requests, and (if an administrator enables “Score new comments with AI”) on comment-save hooks for spam analysis. Posts, pages, and taxonomy terms are not sent automatically. Why it is sent: to obtain model completions and tool-call decisions that drive the AI Assistant. Who provides the service: whichever provider you configured in Settings → Connectors. Which provider (and endpoint) receives the data depends entirely on that configuration. Review the chosen provider’s own terms and privacy policy (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google). URL shortcut favicons When an authorized user creates a desktop shortcut to an external URL, OpenStation asks that URL for its page HTML and favicon so the shortcut can display the site’s icon. The request is made from your WordPress server and sends the requested URL, the server’s IP address, an OpenStation user-agent string, and normal HTTP request metadata to the operator of that site. This happens only when a user creates the shortcut. The destination site’s terms and privacy policy apply. WordPress.org plugin information When an authorized user opens or refreshes parts of OpenStation’s Plugins window, OpenStation may request public plugin details, update metadata, and review excerpts from WordPress.org. These requests send plugin slugs, the site’s locale, and normal HTTP request metadata to WordPress.org. This information is used only to display and manage plugins. Review the WordPress.org Privacy Policy. OpenStation’s OAuth relay does not contact a service by itself. Third-party plugins that configure the relay may contact their own providers and are responsible for disclosing those services. Credits OpenStation is brought to you by Automattic. The plugin is open source under GPLv2-or-later; contributions are welcome on GitHub. Third-party libraries The plugin bundles the following third-party JavaScript library, loaded on demand only when a feature that needs it is in use: PixiJS (MIT License) — used by the Corkboard window, built-in canvas wallpapers (e.g. the animated WordPress logo), the Mio desk companion, and the Inkfall typing game. PixiJS is loaded from the plugin’s own assets/vendor/ directory; no CDN requests are made. Data files The Inkfall game’s word list (assets/games/inkfall/words.txt) is generated from the following sources (attribution also ships in the file’s header): FrequencyWords by Hermit Dave (CC-BY-SA 4.0) — English word-frequency ranking derived from the OpenSubtitles corpus. english-words by dwyl (Unlicense) — used as a validity filter. LDNOOBW English list (CC-BY 4.0) — used as an exclusion filter.