OpenStation vs View Admin As

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.

The ultimate User switcher and Role manager This plugin will add a menu item to your admin bar where you can change your view in the WordPress admin. Switch to other users without the need to login as that user or even switch roles and temporarily change your own capabilities. When you’re viewing as a different user, you can also change this user’s preferences; like screen settings on various admin pages. With the “Role defaults” module you can set default screen settings and metabox locations for roles and apply them to users through various bulk actions. It also features a “Role manager” module to add, edit or remove roles and grant or deny them capabilities. Overview / Features Switch between user accounts Edit this user’s screen preferences and settings Switch between roles Temporarily change your own capabilities (non-destructively) View your site as an unregistered visitor Switch language/locale on backend and frontend Make combinations of the above view types Easily switch back anytime Completely secure (see Security below) Do all the above without logging out! Module: Role defaults (screen settings) Set default screen settings for roles Apply defaults to a user Apply defaults to all users of a role Apply defaults when registering a new user (in a multisite this is done when a user is added to its first blog) Copy defaults from one role to another (or multiple) Import/Export role defaults, can also download (and upload) setting files Disable the “screen settings” option and/or lock the meta boxes for all users that don’t have access to this plugin Click here for Role Defaults documentation Module: Role manager (role editor) Note: Changes made with the Role Manager are permanent! Add, edit or delete roles Grant and/or add capabilities to roles Rename roles Clone roles Import/Export roles, can also download (and upload) setting files Update role capabilities from current view Automatically migrate users to another role after deleting a role Click here for Role Manager documentation Compatibility & Integrations This plugin will work with most other plugins but these are tested: Advanced Access Manager (Pro version not verified) bbPress BuddyPress Genesis Framework (and probably other theme frameworks) Google Site Kit Gravity Forms Groups 2.1+ (Custom integration: adds a view type for groups. Pro version not tested) Pods Framework 2.0+ Members Restrict User Access 0.13+ (Custom integration: adds a view type for access levels) User Roles and Capabilities User Role Editor (Pro version not verified) User Switching (Not sure why you’d want this but yes, switch-ception is possible!) WPFront User Role Editor WP Admin UI Customize 1.5.11+ Yoast SEO Full list of tested plugins and details: Compatibility & Integrations I can’t switch back! See item 3 at FAQ. It’s not working! / I found a bug! Please let me know through the support and add a plugins and themes list! 🙂 Security This plugin is completely safe and will keep your users, passwords and data secure. For more info see item 7 at FAQ! Developer notes This plugin will only be useful for admins (network super admins or regular admins). It will not add functionalities for other roles unless you specifically apply custom capabilities for those users. Also keep in mind that switching to users that have equal roles is disabled. (regular admins to regular admins + super admins to super admins) I’ve created this at first for myself since I’m a developer and often need to see the outcome on roles which my clients use. So, when you are developing a plugin or theme that does anything with roles or capabilities you can use this plugin to easily check if everything works. No more hassle of creating test users and constantly logging out and in anymore! This plugin is also useful to support your clients and/or users. For example; make screen display presets of the edit and overview pages before you let them log in. You can find me here: Keraweb GitHub LinkedIn Translations Please help translating this plugin on translate.wordpress.org! Actions & Filters Click here for Action documentation Click here for Filter documentation Plugin capabilities Click here for documentation Ideas? Please let me know on GitHub!