OpenStation vs Frontman – AI Website Editor

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.

Frontman is an AI editor for an existing WordPress site. Open Frontman from the WordPress admin menu, keep the page visible, and describe the result that you want. Frontman can inspect supported WordPress structures, make the change, and refresh the preview for your review. Use Frontman for focused site updates without hunting through page builders, theme screens, menus, widgets, and settings. One Task, From Request to Review The screenshots show one complete task: Open the page beside Frontman. Select the FAQ title that needs an update. Describe the new title in plain language. Frontman inspects the WordPress content and applies the supported change. Review the refreshed page before you continue. For headers and footers, Frontman can inspect candidate templates, template parts, menus, widgets, and Elementor content. The structure that controls the rendered page depends on the site. Learn how to identify and edit a WordPress header or footer. Before You Install Frontman requires: WordPress administrator access A Frontman account with GitHub or Google sign-in A supported AI provider connected with OAuth or an API key A staging site and a current backup for initial use Frontman does not include a model credential. Your provider can apply its own usage limits and charges. Common Tasks Use Frontman to: Update page copy, headlines, buttons, and calls to action Edit posts, pages, and Gutenberg blocks Adjust supported Elementor content with Elementor-aware tools Update WooCommerce products and other supported store data Change navigation menus, templates, template parts, and supported widgets Update Additional CSS and allowlisted site settings Inspect a page and explain which supported WordPress structure can control it How Frontman Works Frontman puts an AI editor beside a live view of your site. Select mode adds context from the visible element to your request. Frontman then uses WordPress, Elementor, or WooCommerce tools that match the request. The preview refreshes after a supported change, so you can review the page in the same workspace. Frontman works with WordPress content and structures that its current tools support. Custom themes, custom plugins, hosting controls, and unsupported page builders can require a different workflow. Safety, Limits, and Data Only WordPress administrators with the manage_options capability can access Frontman. The plugin uses WordPress nonces, sanitizes inputs, and restricts option changes to an allowlist. Frontman is early-access software. It has not been tested across every theme, page builder, plugin stack, and hosting setup. Start on a staging site. Keep a current backup. Review each change before you use it on a production site. When you submit a request, relevant site content can pass through Frontman AI to your configured model provider. The Third-Party Services section summarizes this data flow. Open Source and Support The Frontman plugin is open source under GPLv2 or later. Browse the code on GitHub. For product details, visit Frontman for WordPress. To report a problem, open a GitHub issue. Third-Party Services This plugin and the hosted Frontman service connect to these external services: Frontman Client and API The plugin loads its interface from app.frontman.sh and connects to api.frontman.sh. Frontman processes prompts, relevant site or store content, tool results, and stored task history to run the agent. Stored provider credentials use server-side encryption. Services: Client, API Provider: Frontman AI Policies: Terms, Privacy AI Model Providers Frontman sends the context needed for your request to your selected AI provider. That provider processes data under its terms and privacy policy. WorkOS, GitHub, and Google Sign-In WorkOS AuthKit provides GitHub and Google sign-in. WorkOS and your selected provider process account and authentication data. WorkOS: Service, Terms, Privacy GitHub: Service, Terms, Privacy Google: Service, Terms, Privacy Analytics and Diagnostics Heap measures product use and onboarding. Sentry records errors and performance diagnostics. These services can process interaction, session, device, browser, identifier, and diagnostic data. Frontman uses Heap based on consent where required. Heap: Service, Privacy Sentry: Service, Privacy Loading the Frontman UI requests hosted client assets. Your site content is not sent to the Frontman API or model providers until you actively use the chat interface and submit a message.