OpenStation vs Synced Pattern Popups

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.

Synced Pattern Popups helps you create popups using the WordPress editor you already know, not yet another builder. Create a Pattern yourself or from the Pattern Library, paste the trigger code as a link anywhere on your site, and your Pattern is now opened via a beautiful and accessible modal popup. Manually triggered by your website viewers because they are interested in your content, not because you’re punishing them for scrolling too far, or exiting your tab. Most popup plugins are built on a desperate lie: if you interrupt your visitor enough times, they’ll eventually give in. They sell “triggers” like exit intent and scroll depth as features, but in reality, these are just ways to guess what a user wants. When you guess wrong, you don’t get a lead; you get a “close” click and a bruised brand reputation. Synced Pattern Popups was built for the site owner who trusts their content and respects their visitors’ time. Built for the Modern WordPress Stack Don’t step out of your workflow into a bespoke, clunky UI. Synced Pattern Popups uses 100% Native Architecture. If it’s a block, it works—forms, videos, or third-party embeds. 🧱 100% Native Architecture: Your popups are Synced Patterns. No parallel builders, no proprietary styling engines, no bloat. 🔌 Zero Integration Friction: If it’s a block, it works. Forms, videos, or third-party embeds—if you can drop it on a page, you can put it in a popup. ♿ Radical Accessibility: Inclusion isn’t an afterthought. Our modals feature rock-solid focus trapping, full keyboard support, and screen-reader optimization out of the box. You don’t have to “fix” your popups for compliance; they’re born ready. 🔄 Global Updates, Zero Effort: Edit your Synced Pattern once, and every instance—across your pages and inside your popups—updates instantly. 🖼️ Media-First Popups: Full support for the Core Gallery block. Stop settling for static images; give your visitors the high-fidelity experience they asked for. ⌘ Built into your Workflow: With Command Palette integration, managing your popups is as fast as typing a shortcut. Key Benefits Global Updates, Zero Effort: Edit a Synced Pattern once, and every instance across your site updates instantly. Performance Optimized: Intelligent caching and AJAX loading ensure your initial page load stays lightning-fast. Developer Friendly: Clean code, WordPress hooks, and Abilities API support for programmatic workflows. AI-Powered TLDR: Generate instant summaries of page content (requires AI Experiments plugin). Major Features ↗️Modal popups powered by Synced Patterns Create your popup content using the native Block Editor – layouts, images, galleries, buttons, and third-party blocks all work. Simple trigger system (class or href) Highlight a word or click into a button then open the hyperlink option. Paste in your Trigger code, for example: #spp-trigger-{id} and now that link will open your modal on click, just like that! You can also set a custom class name on a block: Custom Class name: spp-trigger-{id} (like on a column or section block) Link: href="#spp-trigger-{id}" (handy in the Block Editor) Width overrides By default all modals open at 600px. You can override that in your general settings at “Appearance → Synced Pattern” then the “Defaults” tab. Or you can also set it on a per modal basis within the trigger code by appending the width in pixels to the end of the trigger code: spp-trigger-{id}-{width}. 🖼️Core Gallery Block Support The Core Gallery block has a “lightbox” feature. But that feature does not support image navigation within the lightbox or captions or width management. Synced Pattern Popups lets you do all of that with your Core Gallery blocks. Simply choose the Gallery block (not the individual images within the Gallery block), and click on the link icon (“🔗”). There you’ll see several options, including the Core lightbox feature, and now also “Open in Synced Pattern Popups”. 🤖AI-powered TLDR (optional) Generate AI summaries of the current page content on demand by adding a spp-trigger-tldr trigger. This feature requires the AI Experiments plugin and configured credentials (you’ll see guided setup in the TLDR tab). 💻Handy for Developer Features Synced Pattern Popups is made to be user friendly, but it’s also full of useful utilities for developers. On-demand loading (AJAX) Popup content loads only when needed, which keeps initial page loads fast. Smart caching with automatic invalidation Rendered popup output is cached using WordPress transients for performance, and automatically cleared when synced patterns or default settings change. You can also clear a single pattern’s cache from the admin UI. Full block styling support (core + third‑party) The plugin loads the styles required to render the synced pattern correctly inside the modal – including WordPress core block styles and supported third-party block styles. Accessibility-first modal behavior Includes keyboard navigation (Escape to close, Tab stays within the popup), focus management, and screen-reader friendly UI. Abilities API integration (WordPress 6.9+) On WordPress 6.9+, the plugin registers Abilities to enable programmatic use cases (e.g., rendering popup content via wp_execute_ability() in custom workflows). If the Abilities API isn’t available, the plugin simply skips this integration. How It Works Create a Synced Pattern in WordPress (Appearance → Synced Patterns) Add a trigger as a link or class to any block or element: class="spp-trigger-{ID}" or href="#spp-trigger-{ID}" When clicked, the popup opens with your pattern content Content loads via AJAX for optimal performance What are Synced Patterns? Synced Patterns (stored as wp_block posts) are reusable block layouts you can create and manage once, then reuse across your site. When you edit a synced pattern, any place it’s used is updated automatically. This plugin surfaces them with a dedicated admin screen at Appearance → Synced Patterns, making it easy to: – See each pattern’s ID at a glance – Copy the trigger code – Edit or delete the pattern – Clear the cached popup output when needed Support For support, feature requests, or bug reports, please visit the plugin’s support page or GitHub repository.