OpenStation vs Nested Pages

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.

Why use Nested Pages? Provides a simple & intuitive drag and drop interface for managing your page structure and post ordering Enhanced quick edit functionality Adds an editable, sortable tree view of your site’s page structure Automatically generates a native WordPress menu that matches your page structure A way to quickly add multiple pages & posts (ideal for development) Works with any post type Works on touch-enabled devices For more information visit hookandfilter.com. Important: Nested Pages requires WordPress version 3.8 or higher, and PHP version 5.4 or higher. Languages: Danish (Thomas Blomberg) Dutch (Arno Vije) English Finnish (Roni Laukkarinen) French (Nico Mollet) German/Swiss German (Bartosz Podlewski) Italian (Francesco Canovi) Portuguese (Luis Martins) Russian (Алексей Катаев) Spanish (Raúl Martínez) Swedish (Marcus Forsberg) Turkish (Yuksel Beyti) More Information Generated Menu The default menu generated automatically is named “Nested Pages”. You may rename the menu under Appearance > Menus, or under the Nested Pages settings. Toggling the Page Tree To toggle the child pages in and out of view, click the arrow to the left of a parent page. To quickly expand and collapse all pages, click the button in the upper right corner of the Nested Pages Screen. Theme Use To order by nested pages ordering in your theme, use the menu_order order option in your queries. Hiding Pages from the Tree View To hide a page from the tree view, open the quick edit form, select the option to “Hide in Nested Pages” and click Update to save the change. To toggle the page back into view, click the “Show Hidden Pages” link at the top of the screen. The hidden pages are now visible, and can be re-edited to be shown. Sorting Pages To sort pages, hover over the page row. A menu icon (three lines) will appear. Click (or tap) this icon and drag to reorder within the menu. To drag a page underneath another, drag the page to the right and underneath the target parent. Visual indication is provided with an indentation. The drag and drop functionality works similarly to WordPress menus. Menu Sync After installing Nested Pages, a new menu will be available with the name Nested Pages. By default, menu syncing is enabled. To disable the sync, uncheck “Sync Menu” at the top of the Nested Pages screen. Recheck the box to enable it again and to run the sync. Saving Performance: If your site has a very large number of pages, disabling page sync may help speed up the save time when using Nested Pages. Editing the generated menu: Any manual changes made to the menu outside of the Nested Pages interface will be overwritten after the synchronization runs. Hiding Pages in the Menu: To hide a page from the Nested Pages menu, click “Quick Edit” on it’s row, select “Hide in Nav Menu”, and click “update”. If menu sync is disabled, enable it now to sync the setting. Hidden pages are marked “(Hidden)”. If a page with child pages is hidden from the menu, all of it’s child pages will also be hidden. WPML Compatibility As of version 2.0.1, some features of Nested Pages are compatible with WPML. There are some important exceptions to take note of before upgrading to version 2 if WPML is installed, or if installing WPML on an existing Nested Pages enabled site. WPML and menu support: Certain features within Nested Pages are disabled if WPML is installed and enabled. This is due to the complexity of menu synchronization across languages. While automatic menu sync remains available for the site’s primary language, additional languages must be synchronized using WPML’s menu synchronization methods. If menu sync is enabled within Nested Pages, a “Sync WPML Menus” link is available on non-primary language screens for convenience. Custom Links: Custom links within Nested Pages are disabled on installs with WPML. Custom links may be added through the traditional Appearance > Menus interface. This ensures that WPML menus synchronize successfully across languages. Filters the_title($title, $post_id, $view) – Standard title filter. Applied to the title displayed in the nested interface. A third paramater, $view, is passed to check if the current title is being displayed in the nested view. nestedpages_thumbnail($image, $post) – Customize the thumbnail for each page/post. Note: Thumbnails must be enabled for the post type. nestedpages_thumbnail_fallback($image, $post) – Customize the thumbnail fallback for each page/post (if the post does not have a featured image). Note: Thumbnails must be enabled for the post type. nestedpages_edit_link($link, $post) – Customize the “edit” link for each page/post in the nested interface. nestedpages_edit_link_text($text, $post) – Customize the “edit” link text for each page/post in the nested interface. nestedpages_view_link($link, $post) – Customize the “view” button link for each page/post in the nested interface. nestedpages_view_link_text($text, $post) – Customize the “view” button text for each page/post in the nested interface.