OpenStation vs Webhook Actions – build automations and integrations with AI help

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.

Describe the integration you want. The AI builds it. Webhook Actions ships with Build with AI — an in-admin agent that turns a plain-language request like “When a Contact Form 7 form is submitted, send it as JSON to my n8n webhook” into a working, tested automation. The agent proposes a plan you can review and edit, then creates the webhook, captures a real example payload from your site, maps the fields, sets dispatch conditions, probes your endpoint, and sends a test delivery. Nothing goes live without your confirmation — new webhooks are always created disabled, and you can undo the last change with one click. 📖 Full documentation at wpwebhooks.org/docs/ What you can connect Sources — anything in WordPress that fires an action. Webhook Actions turns any do_action into a trigger, so form submissions, WooCommerce orders, user registrations, post publishes and your own custom plugin events can all start an automation. That covers Elementor Forms, WPForms, Forminator, Fluent Forms, Gravity Forms, WooCommerce and your own code — there is no per-plugin add-on to hunt down. Contact Form 7 and IvyForms go one step further with built-in support: their submissions are normalized into clean JSON payloads automatically. Destinations — any HTTP endpoint. The plugin sends outgoing webhooks to anything that accepts a request: an n8n, Make, Zapier or Pabbly webhook node, a Slack or Discord incoming-webhook URL for order and form notifications, Airtable, Google Sheets, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Salesforce, Notion, your CRM, an internal microservice, or an AI agent API. There are no bundled per-service connectors and none are needed — point a webhook at a URL, map the fields, and send. Every delivery is queued, retried on failure and logged with full request and response history. That makes it a no-code way to sync WordPress data outward: describe what you want in chat and let the AI build it, or wire it up by hand in the admin UI. No PHP required either way. Bring your own AI — free options included WordPress 7.0 AI Client — if your site already has an AI provider connected (Settings → Connectors), the builder uses it directly; the plugin stores no keys Your own API key — connect Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google in the builder; keys are encrypted in the Credentials Vault and never returned over the API Free to run — a free Google AI Studio key gives you Gemini at no cost: step-by-step tutorial Automatic fallback — if a provider is rate-limited mid-build, the agent switches to another connected provider and keeps going What the AI works from The agent doesn’t guess — it works from your site’s real data. It maps fields against actually captured payloads, edits existing webhooks by name or id instead of duplicating them, validates endpoints with a guarded probe (SSRF-protected, secrets always redacted), and verifies the result with a real test delivery. Every operation is also published as a WordPress Ability, so external AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor) can drive the same toolset over MCP with scoped API tokens. The engine underneath (free) Turn any WordPress do_action into a first-class automation trigger your CRMs, n8n flows, AI agents, and internal services can consume — every dispatch is an outgoing webhook you fully control Persistent delivery queue with smart retry and exponential backoff — powered by WP-Cron, auto-upgrades to Action Scheduler or System Cron when available, (Pro) External Cron for guaranteed reliability Per-event UUID and ISO 8601 timestamp — enable downstream deduplication Delivery logs with full attempt history, request/response inspection, replay, and bulk retry Synchronous execution mode — fire inline without queue delay Payload mapping — rename, restructure, exclude, and type-cast fields with dot-notation paths Conditional dispatch — filter events by payload field values before dispatch, so a Slack notification or a CRM sync only fires when it should HTTP method, custom headers, and URL query parameters per webhook Dynamic endpoint URLs — {{ field.path }} placeholders resolved at dispatch time (free via fswa_webhook_url filter) Webhook Chains — wire 2xx completions to downstream webhooks with full observability Import & Export — move webhooks and chains between sites as portable JSON (triggers, field mapping, and conditions included; Code Glue with Pro), with strict validation and a per-item result summary on import Markdown descriptions — document what each webhook and chain does inline, with a Write/Preview toggle while editing Credentials Vault — store reusable auth secrets (Bearer, Basic, API key, custom) encrypted at rest; reference them from webhooks instead of pasting raw Authorization headers. Secrets are write-only over the API — never returned, only a masked hint Activity History — persistent audit log of every admin and API-token action Built-in CF7 and IvyForms integrations — structured payloads, no extra plugins Action Scheduler auto-detection — more reliable delivery on high-traffic sites Fully translatable — the entire admin interface and all server-side strings are internationalized; ships with Polish, Simplified Chinese, and Dutch, and is compatible with WPML and Polylang String Translation Full REST API with scoped API token authentication (read / operational / full / agent) — the agent scope grants full write access for AI assistants while never exposing stored secrets Developer extensibility — 16 filters and 7 action hooks (reference) Pro features AI credits included — Build with AI runs through the hosted WP Webhooks AI service on every Pro plan: no API keys to create, no provider accounts, a monthly credit allowance that renews automatically, and a live credits counter in the builder. Your own keys and WordPress connectors stay available any time AI writes Code Glue for you — the agent drafts PHP snippets, test-runs them against your real captured payloads, and assigns them to webhooks (with your confirmation) for pre-dispatch payload enrichment or post-dispatch side effects AI sets advanced conditions — with Pro the agent can propose multi-rule AND/OR condition groups instead of a single rule Code Glue — attach PHP snippets to any webhook+trigger (pre-dispatch payload enrichment, post-dispatch side effects) External Cron — replace unreliable visitor-triggered WP-Cron with a managed external pinger, provisioned automatically on license activation. Two modes: plugin queue endpoint (down to 20 s interval, configurable batch size) or WP-Cron endpoint (60 s, covers all WordPress background work). No server crontab or external dashboard — controlled entirely from wp-admin, with a live heartbeat chart and inline error alerts Unlimited conditions per trigger with AND/OR groups Per-webhook retry limit and backoff strategy overrides Dynamic URL templates — {{ }} syntax with no custom PHP required See pricing and upgrade → Examples Send Contact Form 7 submissions to a webhook (n8n demo) Send Gravity Forms Submissions to n8n Send IvyForms submissions to a webhook (n8n demo) WooCommerce orders to n8n on completion — wired up with a Claude Code agent WooCommerce to HubSpot integration — sync orders, contacts, and deals with no custom code