OpenStation vs Slash Admin

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.

Slash Admin gathers some common functions that you probably need in most of your websites. The plugin lets you change various different options in a WordPress website, keeps them active even if you switch your theme and helps you create a friendlier Admin Panel for you and your editors. If you are lost with the many options, here’s a presentation of the plugin’s best features. Features Frontend Option to point to a static splash page. Option to convert email addresses characters to HTML entities to block spam bots. Show EU Cookie Law consent message (check screenshots about available options). Since v.3.0 it also supports WPML for different message per language. Add a “Loading” animation which hides itself when the page is fully loaded Enqueue your own Google Web Fonts, with option to load it locally for better performance and privacy Get rid of the word “Category:” in front of the Archive title (usually needed if your theme uses the_archive_title()). Add excerpt support to pages. Enable the use of shortcodes in widgets. Display a warning for users of old versions of Internet Explorer (IE8 or older). Yes, sadly there are still people who use Internet Explorer 8… Administration Insert Google Analytics tracking code (so as you don’t have to remember re-entering it in case you switch themes in the future) Hide Site Health from everyone except from a selected Admin (read more) Hide ACF options from everyone except from the selected Admin Since WordPress 5.2 there is a built-in feature that detects when a plugin or theme causes a fatal error on your site, and notifies you with this automated email. By default, it will be sent to the admin email. Slash Admin allows you to override it (you can also add multiple recipients if you like). Read more Change the address that receives the Plugin and Theme auto-update email notifications Make WordPress respect the order of the tags you insert in a post (read more) Limit the number of revisions that WordPress keeps for each post (keeps the database cleaner) Prevent Post Updates and Deletion After a Set Period. Useful if you have many editors or in cases where an editor’s account is compromised, adding spam code to the posts (by disallowing editing of older posts you limit the damage) Enable Jetpack development mode Move Jetpack share and like buttons Maintenance mode. If checked, non-Admins will not be able to acess the WordPress backend and they will see a customizable message instead. Useful if you want to perform some maintenance work to your website and you don’t want your Editors to add or modify the content before you finish. Admins are not affected and they can always login as usual. Login screen Add your custom logo at the WordPress log-in screen Make the login screen logo (custom or default) linking to your website’s homepage instead of wordpress.org After login, redirect users at the homepage instead of their profile page Disable the Admin Bar for all users except Administrators. Applies only to the front-end. It’s useful if you want your site to be visible only to logged-in users (e.g. during developement phase), but you don’t want them to access the dashboard or get confused with the admin bar Add your custom CSS to the login screen to completely change its appearance Non-admins Hide unnecessary options from the Admin menu for non admins (so editors won’t get overwhelmed with options that have no meaning for the current website). Disable tags and categories Hide specific pages from non admins. For example, you might not want your editors to have access to the static frontpage, the blog page or pages that you use as page templates. Allow editors to manage Menus and Widgets and access some other appearance settings previously acessible only to admins (for example, you might want to give your client the option to modify the website’s menu, but you would rather avoid making him/her an administrator). Hide notices about updating WordPress and other plugins for all users except from Admins (sometimes clients get confused with those notices and think that there is something wrong with the website). White label backend Change the “Howdy” message at the top right corner of the admin (both backend and logged-in frontend) Change the default footer text at the admin Replace the WordPress logo at the top left corner of the admin bar with your own (both backend and logged-in frontend) Replace the default Welcome message at the Dashboard with your own Add a Dashboard Widget to provide general or commercial information to your clients (for example: your contact info or links to support documentation) Add your own custom CSS for the Admin area Performance Disable Emojis Disable wp-embed script from the frontend or load it conditionally DNS prefetching notifies the client that there are assets we’ll need later from a specific URL (outside our website’s domain) so the browser can resolve the DNS as quickly as possible. Link prefetching and prerendering. Link prefetching is a browser mechanism, which utilizes browser idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future. A web page provides a set of prefetching hints to the browser, and after the browser is finished loading the page, it begins silently prefetching specified documents and stores them in its cache. When the user visits one of the prefetched documents, it can be served up quickly out of the browser’s cache. Prerendering downloads and renders the entire page and hides it from the user until it is requested, therefore, it should be used with caution. Shortcodes If you manually include email addresses in your posts, you should consider disguising them in order to “fool” e-mail harvesters (check FAQ for details). Show a telephone number in a way that it is clickable. When clicked, if you are on a mobile device it opens the phone’s dialer and if you are on a desktop computer it prompts to make a call via a related program (e.g. Skype). If you develop your site on localhost or on a temporary URL, you might want to avoid absolute URLs inside posts and pages. That way you don’t need to update your links after migrating to your actual domain (check FAQ for details). Development functions Using slash_dump() instead of var_dump() will wrap the output in tags, for better readability. slash_admin_dump() does the same thing, only this time the output is only visible to admins (can be handy if you want to debug a live site). Show warnings if the site is on air and debug mode is still on and if the site is on localhost and debug mode is off. Also, show warning if the website is on air and you have chosen to hide it from Search Engines. Notifications Slash Admin displays the following notifications: A list with the users who logged in during the past 15 minutes (except from you, obviously) A warning when debug mode is enabled (you should enable it when developing, but disable it when the site goes live) A warning when your site is hidden from search engines