OpenStation vs WinaltChat for WooCommerce

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.

WinaltChat adds a fast, intelligent chat widget to your WooCommerce store. Customers can search your product catalogue, get instant answers about shipping and returns, and — when they need a real person — connect to your support team through a built-in live chat system, all without leaving your store. AI Shopping Assistant Dual AI Modes — Use your own API key from Groq — LLaMA (Free Tier), ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), or Gemini (Google) for full conversational AI. No key? The built-in Basic AI mode runs entirely on your server with zero external calls and zero ongoing cost. Smart Product Search — Intent-aware search across your WooCommerce catalogue. Handles typos, synonyms, multilingual and mixed-language queries, and follow-up questions naturally. Product Comparisons — Customers can ask “which is better, the Sony or the Samsung?” and get a clear side-by-side comparison with prices and key specs from your own catalogue. Store Knowledge Base — Reads your shipping, returns, contact, and about pages to answer policy questions accurately and dynamically — no hardcoded answers that break for other stores. Conversation Context — Remembers context within a session so follow-up questions (“does it come in blue?”) work naturally. Amazon Affiliate Fallback — When a product is out of stock, optionally suggest an Amazon affiliate link so you still earn a commission. Live Human Chat Human Handoff — When a customer types phrases like “I want to talk to a human”, “customer service”, “live agent”, or dozens of natural variants, the plugin detects the request and connects them to a real person on your team. Admin Live Chats Dashboard — A dedicated Live Chats screen in your WordPress admin shows all active, waiting, and closed conversations in a two-panel interface. Every handoff request is queued here as soon as it happens — keep the tab open to also show as instantly online to visitors and connect in real time. Visitor Name Prompt — Before connecting, the visitor is optionally asked for their name. If skipped, they are identified as “Visitor #ID” so you can tell conversations apart. Full Conversation Context for Agents — When a customer is handed off, the admin sees the complete prior AI conversation so there is no need to ask “how can I help?” twice. Visitor Presence Dot — A green dot shows the visitor is active. It turns grey within 30 seconds if they close the tab. Two-Tier Timeout — If your team does not respond within 90 seconds, the visitor sees a friendly patience message. After 5 minutes of no reply, the chat gracefully falls back to the AI assistant with an optional email capture. Intelligent Offline Handling — When no admin is online the AI keeps helping, and the handoff request is still queued in the background so it’s waiting in your Live Chats list whenever you next check — no need to have caught it live. Visitors can also optionally leave their email for a follow-up; leads appear with a dedicated Leads section and unread badge. Session Management — Close chats when resolved, or delete them permanently. Closed and lead sessions stay visible in their own sections until manually removed. Zero External Dependencies — Live chat runs entirely within your WordPress site using secure AJAX polling over the REST API. No Pusher, no third-party service, no extra cost. Email Notifications — Get an email when a customer starts a live chat or leaves their contact details while you are offline. Privacy & Security All live chat data is stored in your own WordPress database. Nothing is sent to an external service. Session tokens are 32-character cryptographically random strings — not sequential IDs — so sessions cannot be enumerated. All endpoints enforce nonces, capability checks, input sanitization, output escaping, and rate limiting. Message content is sanitized server-side, and rich chat HTML (product cards, links, images) is additionally sanitized client-side via a bundled copy of DOMPurify before being rendered — see “Bundled Libraries” below. Bundled Libraries DOMPurify 3.1.6 — client-side HTML sanitizer, used to safely render rich chat content (product cards, links, images). Vendored locally at assets/js/vendor/purify.min.js; not loaded from a CDN. © Cure53 and other contributors. Dual-licensed under the Apache License 2.0 and Mozilla Public License 2.0, both GPL-compatible. github.com/cure53/DOMPurify Requirements WordPress 6.2 or later WooCommerce 7.0 or later (must be installed and active) PHP 7.4 or later An API key from Groq, OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google (optional — Basic AI and Live Chat both work without one) Support Support Forum: wordpress.org/support/plugin/winaltchat-for-woocommerce Email: [email protected] We aim to respond to all support requests within 48 hours. External Services This plugin connects to third-party AI providers only when you configure an external AI mode and enter your own API key. In Basic AI mode and during live human chat, no external AI service is used. AI Providers (optional — only when an API key is configured) Customer messages, recent conversation context, and relevant store and product context are sent to the AI provider you select so it can generate a response. No data is sent to these providers when using Basic AI mode. Groq — groq.com | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service OpenAI — openai.com | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use Anthropic Claude — anthropic.com | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service Google Gemini — ai.google.dev | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service Amazon Associate Program (optional — only when a tag is configured) When the Amazon fallback is enabled and no matching product is found in your store, the plugin generates an Amazon search link with your Associate tag. No customer data is transmitted to Amazon by the plugin — the link simply directs the visitor’s browser. Amazon — amazon.com | Privacy Notice Deactivation Feedback (optional — only sent if you respond to the deactivation survey) When you deactivate this plugin, an optional short survey asks why. If you respond (or skip), your site URL, the plugin/WordPress/PHP version, and whatever you entered in the survey are sent to Winalt Technologies to help improve the plugin. No personal data is collected beyond this unless you choose to type it into the free-text field yourself. Winalt Technologies — aisalesmanchatpro.com | Privacy Policy Anonymous Usage Tracking (optional — off by default, only sent if you click “Allow”) On first use, a notice asks permission to send anonymous “still active” pings to help us understand real-world installs. Nothing is sent unless you click “Allow” — you can also decline, or change your choice later from the plugin’s General Settings tab. When enabled, your site URL and the plugin/WordPress/PHP version are sent to Winalt Technologies once immediately and then roughly once a day for as long as it stays enabled. No personal or customer data is ever included. Winalt Technologies — aisalesmanchatpro.com | Privacy Policy