OpenStation vs GovernDocs Document Library – Policies, Meetings, Reports for Council, Gov & Institutions

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.

GovernDocs is a document library plugin for WordPress. For organisations, governments & councils that need document governance and a clearer way to manage & publish important records. Dedicated content types for policies, meeting documents and reports. These documents are stored in a structured way with dedicated fields for files, dates, versions, status information and other governance-related details. You can then display each document on your website using shortcodes. GovernDocs is suitable for councils, governments, associations, clubs, schools, law firms, committees, non-profits and other organisations that need a simple way to manage official documents in WordPress. Upgrade to the PRO version to get full audit logs, custom statuses, extra styling of documents on the frontend, add additional files and add external links to documents. GovernDocs PRO also adds shortcode access controls so you can hide a document from selected roles and show an alternative call to action instead. GovernDocs Document Library Features Dedicated content types for Policy, Meeting and Report Structured fields for governance related content Attach files to records Publish documents as web content, file downloads or both Publish as PDF downloads, Word doc downloads Display items using shortcodes Show document metadata such as type, extension, size, dates, version and status Store previous versions for policies Clean admin editing experience for document-based content GovernDocs helps separate governance content from normal website content so your official records are easier to manage and easier for visitors to find. Policy Features Use Policies for official policy documents that are displayed on the front end of your website, or you can keep them as internal policies only. Users can download your PDF policy or other formats, or you can display the policy directly within any page or post type with a shortcode. Each Policy has fields to include: Version Policy ID Status Policy Owner Responsible Role Approving Authority Downloadable file Effective Date Approval Date Next Review Date Last Review Date Department Plus other fields relating to governance, compliance and records. Meeting Features Use Meetings for meeting-related entries such as agenda and minutes. These can be published as web content, downloadable files or both. Each Meeting has fields to include: Meeting Date Meeting ID Status Chair Minute Taker Location Description Agenda File Agenda Publish Date Agenda Notes Minutes File Minutes Publish Date Minutes Notes Department Report Features Use Reports for annual reports, financial reports, strategic reports, operational reports and other formal publications. Each Report has fields to include: Image cover for the report Report Type Report ID Status Author Published Date Report Date Description Department Shortcode support GovernDocs includes shortcode output so you can place document records into pages, posts, templates or any area that accepts shortcodes. Examples of the shortcodes: [governdocs type="policy" id="123"] [governdocs type="meeting" id="123"] [governdocs type="report" id="123"] [governdocs type="policy" id="123" show_icon="1" button="1" display="card" desc_location="below_title" class="custom-policy-card" fields="ext,size,type,status,version,effective_date,approval_date,review_date,last_reviewed_date,owner,approving_authority,policy_id" order="ext,size,type,status,version,effective_date,approval_date,review_date,last_reviewed_date,owner,approving_authority,policy_id" ] GovernDocs PRO can also restrict shortcode output for selected roles: [governdocs type="policy" id="123" blocked_roles="subscriber,customer" blocked_button_text="Request Access" blocked_button_url="https://example.com/request-access" blocked_button_new_tab="1" blocked_button_class="button button-primary" blocked_description="This document is not available for your account type."] You can also use guest, logged_out, or not_logged_in inside blocked_roles to show the fallback output to visitors who are not signed in. If you want to invert the logic, use allowed_roles instead. When allowed_roles is set, only those roles will see the document and everyone else will see the fallback output. Who it is for GovernDocs is built for websites that need more structure than a normal blog or page setup, especially where documents need to be maintained over time. Examples include: Local government and council websites Associations and member organisations Sporting clubs and community groups Schools and education providers Compliance-focused business websites Boards and committees