OpenStation vs Mission – Donation Plugin for WordPress – Fundraising & Recurring Donations

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.

Mission is a free WordPress donation plugin built for nonprofits. Accept one-time and recurring donations, let supporters fundraise for you with peer-to-peer crowdfunding campaigns, manage donors and campaigns, give your supporters a self-service dashboard, and track everything from a modern admin, without paying for a single add-on. Most donation plugins lock the features you actually need behind a paid tier. Recurring donations? Add-on. Custom fields? Add-on. Peer-to-peer fundraising? That one costs hundreds per year. Donor dashboards, fee recovery, exports? Add-on, add-on, add-on. Mission takes a different approach: every feature ships in the free plugin, and we’re funded by an optional tip donors can choose to add at checkout. Donors can change the tip, lower it, or set it to zero. 100% of the donation amount always reaches your nonprofit. The result is a donation platform that grows with your organization without surprise upgrade prompts. The plugin you install today is the plugin handling your donations next year, with no upsell screens between you and your supporters. ✨ Why Mission No paid add-ons. Ever. Recurring donations, peer-to-peer fundraising, donor dashboards, campaign management, custom fields, tribute donations, fee recovery, exports, activity logs. All included in the free plugin. There is no “Mission Pro” version, no premium tier, and no upsell at checkout. Modern donation forms that convert. Multi-step forms with suggested amounts, custom amounts, tribute dedications, anonymous donations, optional fee recovery. Built to feel quick and trustworthy on every device. Built for performance. The donation form is built on the WordPress Interactivity API, so there’s no React on the public-facing site, no bloated JavaScript, and fast page loads for your donors. Donor data lives in dedicated database tables, not post meta, so reporting stays fast as your donor list grows into the thousands. 💝 Powerful donation forms The Donation Form block can be dropped into any post, page, or campaign. Configure it once and it adapts to your campaign and your brand: Suggested amounts and an optional custom-amount field, configured per frequency One-time and recurring giving (weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually), with per-form control over which frequencies to offer Multi-step layout that keeps the donor focused Cover-the-fees option lets donors absorb processing fees so 100% of their donation reaches your cause Anonymous donation toggle Tribute and memorial dedications, with an optional notification email to the honoree Custom fields per form: text, textarea, select, multiselect, radio, checkbox Built-in client and server-side validation Low-specificity CSS with no !important rules so themes can restyle freely 🔁 Recurring donations included free Recurring donations are the single biggest revenue lever for nonprofits, and they’re the feature other plugins charge extra for. Mission ships them free: Weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual frequencies Automatic renewal with retry on failure Donor self-service: pause, resume, or cancel from the donor dashboard Renewal history tracked per subscription Email notifications for renewals, cancellations, and failed payments Admin controls to pause, resume, cancel, or retry any subscription 👥 A donor dashboard your supporters will actually use Drop the Donor Dashboard block on any page and your supporters get a self-service portal. They can: See a complete donation history Manage recurring donations: pause, resume, or cancel without contacting you Download a receipt for any donation Update their profile and email address Sign in with a magic-link email, so there’s no password to forget Every action your donors can take in the dashboard is one less email in your inbox. 🎯 Campaign management Run a single ongoing campaign or dozens of named campaigns side by side: Set goals by total raised, donation count, or unique donor count Auto-generated campaign pages built on the WordPress block editor Start and end dates per campaign Active, draft, and archived statuses Real-time aggregates that update as donations complete Mission ships twelve campaign and donation blocks: donation form, donate button, campaign card, campaign grid, campaign image, campaign description, campaign progress bar, campaign statistic, donor wall, recent donors, top donors, and donor dashboard. Mix and match them to build campaign pages that match your brand. Not using the block editor? Every block has a shortcode equivalent that works in page builders like Elementor and Bricks. 🤝 Peer-to-peer fundraising Let your supporters fundraise for you. Mark a campaign as peer-to-peer and anyone can sign up, on their own or as part of a team, and get a personal crowdfunding page to share: Supporters sign up right on the campaign page, verify their email, and their page is live in minutes Personal pages with a story, cover photo, goal, and live progress bar Teams, with captains who can invite members by email, keep the team private, promote a new captain, and manage the roster Approve every sign-up manually, or let pages go live instantly A fundraiser dashboard where participants edit their page, track progress, see their donors, and grab share links Donations automatically credit the fundraiser and their team, including recurring renewals Milestone emails celebrate 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of each fundraiser’s goal Twelve more blocks for fundraiser and team pages, including Top Fundraisers and Top Teams leaderboards, with both page layouts editable as Site Editor templates Peer-to-peer crowdfunding is the feature other donation platforms charge hundreds of dollars a year for. In Mission it’s free, like everything else. 📊 Reports and exports you can actually use The admin dashboard surfaces what fundraisers care about: total revenue, donation count, average donation, repeat donor count, top donor, and month-over-month growth, in test and live modes side by side. Need the data outside WordPress? Export donors, transactions, campaigns, and subscriptions to CSV or JSON in a single click. A built-in activity log records every donation, refund, subscription event, webhook, email, and admin action with a 90-day retention window so you can audit anything that happened on your site. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Who Mission is for Mission is built to fit any organization or individual raising money online: Nonprofits and charities Foundations, clubs, and NGOs Churches and faith communities Schools, PTAs, and education nonprofits Political campaigns and advocacy groups Community groups and mutual aid funds Individuals crowdfunding for a specific cause 🫙 How the optional tip model works Mission is funded by donor tips, not by selling features. Here’s exactly how that works: At checkout, donors see a small optional tip alongside their donation amount. The tip is preselected at a small percentage by default. Donors can change it, lower it, or set it to zero. 100% of the donation amount goes to your connected Stripe account. Prefer a flat platform fee instead of donor tips? You can switch to a fixed 3% platform fee per form. Source Code The full, unminified source code for this plugin is publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/mission-wp/mission See the README in the repository for full development setup, contribution guidelines, and a description of the build pipeline. External Services This plugin connects to the following third-party services: Stripe processes donations. Payment data is sent from the donor’s browser to Stripe via Stripe.js, and Stripe sends webhook notifications back for payment, refund, and subscription events. See Stripe’s Terms and Privacy Policy. Mission API proxies Stripe Connect onboarding, payment requests, and webhook forwarding to your site. If you opt in to feature notifications under Tools > Features, your email is also sent here. See Mission’s Terms and Privacy Policy. Gravatar supplies donor avatars in the admin and on the Donor Wall block. Email addresses are hashed before being sent. See Gravatar’s Terms and Privacy Policy.