OpenStation vs Easy Widget Columns

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.

Easy Widget Columns makes it really easy to arrange your widgets in rows of columns. It works by adding a new ‘Column width’ select option at the bottom of your widget’s form that allows you to set a width value for each widget. You can define new rows and sub-rows of widget columns with the ‘Widget Row’ widget and the ‘Sub-Row’ widget respectively, allowing you to create complex layouts directly from within your widget area or sidebar. Genesis Framework users, be sure to check out the Widgetized Page Template plugin, which helps you create full-page widget areas to use as a “blank canvas” with Easy Widget Columns. Works With Most Themes Easy Widget Columns is optimized for use with the Genesis Framework, but it is not required. It uses the Genesis Framework Column Classes to display your widgets in rows of columns. If your theme already incorporates the Genesis Framework Column Classes, or you want to manually add or edit the CSS, you can choose not to load the CSS under ‘Settings’ > ‘Widget Columns’ and rely on your theme’s stylesheet instead. This option is recommended for most Genesis users or those concerned with loading additional assets on their website. Translation and RTL Ready The plugin supports RTL layouts and is translation ready. Filters for Developers The following filters are available for you to take full control of the plugin on your themes. ewc_include_widgets – This whitelist filter is used to add the width control ONLY to the specified widgets. ewc_exclude_widgets – This blacklist filter is used to remove the width control from the specified widgets. ewc_color_palette – This filter allows you to add a custom color palette to the color picker control in the ‘Widget Row’ widget. ewc_preset_classes – This filter allows you assign preset CSS classes that display as a checkbox list in the ‘Widget Row’ widget. ewc_advanced_options – This filter allows you to remove specific or all advanced options from the ‘Widget Row’ widget. 1. ewc_include_widgets / ewc_exclude_widgets Both filters accept the widget’s ID base as parameters. Please note that you cannot use both filters at once. The ewc_include_widgets filter will always take precedence over the ewc_exclude_widgets filter and overwrite it. The examples below demonstrate how you can implement these filters on your theme. add_filter( 'ewc_include_widgets', 'myprefix_add_ewc_control' ); /** * Filter to add the EWC control to specified widgets. * * @param array An empty array. * @return array An array containing the widget's ID base. */ function myprefix_add_ewc_control( $ewc_widgets ) { $ewc_widgets = array( 'meta', // WP Meta widget 'archives', // WP Archives widget 'calendar', // WP Calendar widget 'categories', // WP Categories widget ); return $ewc_widgets; } add_filter( 'ewc_exclude_widgets', 'myprefix_remove_ewc_control' ); /** * Filter to remove the EWC control from specified widgets. * * @param array An empty array. * @return array An array containing the widget's ID base. */ function myprefix_remove_ewc_control( $ewc_widgets ) { $ewc_widgets = array( 'recent-comments', // WP Recent Comments widget 'recent-posts', // WP Recent Posts widget 'rss', // WP RSS widget 'tag_cloud', // WP Tag Cloud widget ); return $ewc_widgets; } 2. ewc_color_palette This filter allows you to add a custom color palette to the color picker control in the ‘Widget Row’ widget. It accepts an array of hex color values as parameters. The example below demonstrates how you can implement this filter on your theme. add_filter( 'ewc_color_palette', 'myprefix_ewc_color_palette' ); /** * Filter to edit the color palette in the color picker control. * * @param array An empty array. * @return array An array containing hex color values. */ function myprefix_ewc_color_palette( $color_palette ) { $color_palette = array( '#252724', '#ce6b36', '#31284b', '#a03327', '#3b3e3e', '#67b183', ); return $color_palette; } 3. ewc_preset_classes This filter allows you assign preset CSS classes that display as a checkbox list in the ‘Widget Row’ widget. The following example demonstrates how you can implement this filter on your theme. add_filter( 'ewc_preset_classes', 'myprefix_preset_classes' ); /** * Filter for predefining EWC Widget Row classes. * * @param array An empty array. * @return array An array containing new values. */ function myprefix_preset_classes( $classes ) { $classes = array( 'hero', 'parallax', 'slider', 'content', ); return $classes; } 4. ewc_advanced_options This filter allows you to remove specific or all advanced options from the ‘Widget Row’ widget. This can be useful for limiting design functionality on a client website (decisions, not options). The following example demonstrates how to completely remove all advanced options. // Remove all advanced options from the Widget Row widget. add_filter( 'ewc_advanced_options', '__return_false' ); The example below demonstrates how to disable or enable specific advanced options. The display parameter toggles the advanced option and the active parameter determines if the panel will display open (1) or closed (0) when the Widget Row widget is first added into a widget area. add_filter( 'ewc_advanced_options', 'myprefix_display_advanced_options' ); /** * Filter to remove specific advanced options from the Widget Row widget. * * @param array An array containing default values. * @return array An array containing new values. */ function myprefix_display_advanced_options( $display ) { $display = array( 'ewc_background' => array( 'display' => true, 'active' => 1, ), 'ewc_margin' => array( 'display' => false, 'active' => 0, ), 'ewc_padding' => array( 'display' => false, 'active' => 0, ), 'ewc_class' => array( 'display' => true, 'active' => 0, ), ); return $display; }