OpenStation vs Global Meta Box Order

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.

Intuitively harmonize meta box positions and screen column layout for all backend users of your WordPress installation. Quick Overview Install and activate the plugin Switch to a post, a page, a custom post type, or the dashboard Change the order and position of a meta box (or all of them) Change the column layout Switch to a different user (maybe with the help of the User Switching plugin) See your changes applied Installation Download and unpack, then move the folder ‘global-meta-box-order’ into your ‘plugins’ folder. Head over to your WordPress installation and activate the plugin in the admin area. Rollback The plugin doesn’t write anything to the database, it just reads. So it never touches any user settings, but instead filters them on a per request basis. Though all applied changes appear to be permanent from a user’s perspective, they are not. Just deactivate the plugin and see all changes disappear. Activate it again, and they will all be reapplied. How It Works The plugin operates on a blueprint user whose screen settings for meta boxes (visibility, position and ordering), and column layout are cloned for all other backend users on the fly. By default, this blueprint user is the first admin user found, so you’ll need to be logged in as that user to globally change screen settings. For how to change the default blueprint user as well as other settings, please refer to the Configuration section below. Where It Works By default, the plugin kicks in when a user: edits a post edits a page edits a custom post type hits the dashboard What It Changes It will always change the meta boxes visibility, ordering, and column positions the column layout When told so, it will also remove the screen options box immobilize all boxes, so they can’t be moved around by your users anymore Usage Log in as your blueprint user. By default, the is the first admin user found in your system. Select an editing screen (post, page, custom post type) or the dashboard, move the meta boxes around, change their screen settings and the screen’s column layout. Switch to some user to review your settings, switch back to adjust them. When done, you might want to lock your views down by removing the screen options box and by locking the boxes’ sort order. Your blueprint user, of course, wil not be affected by this. Configuration The backend integration is kept to a minimum. No navigation entry, no options page, no entry in the database. Instead, the place to go to configure the plugin is your theme’s functions.php. By the way: You don’t need to configure the plugin. As long as it finds an admin user, it will work just fine. Preparation Fire up an editor, load your functions.php, and copy and paste the following code into it. The idea is to have some sort of container to do the configuration in, but do it any way you like. For brevity, we’ll assume the plugin is loaded and active, so we won’t check for that (see this nice write-up on QueryLoop on some ways to do it, though). if (is_admin()) { // The path to the configuation is rather long, so let's // make us a shorthand. class_alias('\GlobalMetaBoxOrder\Config', 'MetaBoxConfig'); // Add MetaBoxConfig below this line ... } Now we are ready to add some of the configuration settings below to adjust the plugin’s default behaviour. You might also want to have a look at the example configuration near the end of this document. Please keep in mind that you need to be logged in as any user but your blueprint user to see a setting applied. Again, the User Switching plugin might come in handy. Screens To Operate On By default, the plugin operates on the post, page, and custom post type editing screens, and the dashboard. You can change this as follows: // Operate on post and page screens only, leave the dashboard alone. // This will still include custom post types. MetaBoxConfig::$filter = array('post', 'page'); // Exclude custom post types MetaBoxConfig::$include_cpts = false; // Allow custom post types... MetaBoxConfig::$include_cpts = true; // ...but not all of them MetaBoxConfig::$exclude = array('acme_product'); MetaBoxConfig in the example above is assumed to be an alias to \GlobalMetaBoxOrder\Config as shown in the preparation section above. Changing the Blueprint User Register a function that returns a user id, like so: MetaBoxConfig::$getBlueprintUserId = function () { return 1; }; Or, more involved: MetaBoxConfig::$getBlueprintUserId = function () { $user = get_user_by('slug', 'jane'); return $user ? $user->ID : false; }; MetaBoxConfig in the example above is assumed to be an alias to \GlobalMetaBoxOrder\Config as shown in the preparation section above. Locking Views By default, all users will be able to interact with the screen options box, and to move around the meta boxes themselves. There is a rationale behind it, but to cut things short, this is how you might want to change it: // No screen options MetaBoxConfig::$remove_screen_options = true; // Meta boxes can't be moved anymore MetaBoxConfig::$lock_meta_box_order = true; MetaBoxConfig in the example above is assumed to be an alias to \GlobalMetaBoxOrder\Config as shown in the preparation section above. Example Configuration if (is_admin()) { // Make sure plugin is active if (class_exists('\GlobalMetaBoxOrder\Config')) { // Make a long name short. class_alias('\GlobalMetaBoxOrder\Config', 'MetaBoxConfig'); // Settings MetaBoxConfig::$filter = array('post', 'page', 'dashboard'); // default MetaBoxConfig::$include_cpts = true; // default MetaBoxConfig::$getBlueprintUserId = function () { return 1; }; MetaBoxConfig::$exclude = array('acme_product'); MetaBoxConfig::$remove_screen_options = true; MetaBoxConfig::$lock_meta_box_order = true; } } On Moving the WYSIWYG Editor The position of WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor is fixed, and can’t be changed out of the box (mostly because it lacks a box around it). There are reasons for this, but if you want to have a positionable editor anyway, you might want to have a look at our very own Movable Editor plugin. If, on the other hand, if you want to place one specific box above the editor, you might want to check out this answer on stackexchange.