OpenStation vs Paca AI – Professional AI Content Assistant & Search

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.

Your AI search & writing partner, built right into WordPress. Creating great content takes time. Paca AI puts powerful AI directly inside your post editor — no switching tabs, no copy-pasting, no leaving WordPress. In seconds, you can generate excerpts, write entire posts, proofread your content, and create stunning images. Everything happens right where you already work. Write More. Stress Less. Starting a new post is the hardest part. With Help Write, just describe what you want — “Write a blog post about the best hiking trails in Peru” — and Paca AI drafts it for you instantly. Structured headings, clean paragraphs, ready to edit. A blank page becomes a finished draft in seconds. Already have a post written? Hit Proof Read and Paca AI silently cleans up your spelling, grammar, and punctuation — without touching your formatting, links, or headings. What you wrote, just polished. Stop Writing Excerpts. Start Generating Them. Excerpts matter — for SEO, for social sharing, for your readers. But writing them is tedious. Create Excerpt reads your post and generates a sharp, on-brand summary in seconds. One click, done. You can even tell Paca AI exactly how you want your excerpts written, and it remembers every time. Beautiful Images Without a Designer Need a featured image? Create Image generates a professional, text-free illustration based on your post content — automatically uploaded to your media library and ready to publish. No Canva, no stock photos, no waiting. Just your content, turned into imagery that fits. AI That Learns Your Site The more Paca AI knows about your site, the better it performs. The AI Training feature quietly analyzes your recent posts in the background, building a picture of your topics, tone, and expertise. Every excerpt, image, and piece of generated content becomes more on-brand over time — without you doing a thing. A Search Experience Your Visitors Will Love Replace keyword search with something smarter. Paca AI Search understands the meaning behind your visitors’ questions, not just the words. Ask “What’s good for beginners?” and it finds relevant posts — even if none of them use that exact phrase. Drop the search block anywhere on your site and your content becomes genuinely discoverable. Visitors can also hit the Summarize button on any page and get an instant plain-English summary — great for long-form content, tutorials, or resource pages. Built to Be Customized Every site is different, and Paca AI is built with that in mind. The AI Search block drops into any page with a single click and works out of the box — but it doesn’t stop there. Customize the placeholder text, control how many results appear, adjust the search personality from a focused search tool to a conversational assistant, and write your own prompt to define exactly how answers are formatted. The Summary button is a simple shortcode you can place anywhere, with full control over the content selector, output location, summary length, and cooldown time. Prefer to build your own UI? Every feature is powered by standard WordPress AJAX endpoints, making it straightforward to create a fully custom experience while Paca AI handles all the AI logic behind the scenes. Designed to Stay Out of Your Way Paca AI lives in a clean metabox right inside the post editor — everything you need in one place. Generate excerpts, create images, proofread, get writing help, and control whether the post appears in AI Search, all without leaving the page. No cluttered toolbars, no modal takeovers, no learning curve. The settings are clean, the defaults work out of the box, and everything is one click away. Upgrade to Streaming — Answers That Feel Instant With a Paca AI license, your AI Search comes alive. Instead of waiting for a full answer to load, responses stream directly to your visitors word-by-word — just like ChatGPT. It feels dramatically faster, keeps visitors engaged, and makes your site feel genuinely modern. The license also unlocks priority response times and dedicated infrastructure, so your site never competes for resources. Paca AI works with OpenAI and Google Gemini. Bring your own API key and get started in minutes. Links Website Documentation AI Streaming