OpenStation: Desktop Windows, Dock & Virtual Desktops for WP Admin

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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5MLB3WMlCc 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.

1. Install via Plugins → Add New (search for "OpenStation"), or upload the plugin folder to /wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate the plugin through the Plugins screen.
3. Click the desktop icon in the admin bar's top-right corner. The admin reloads inside the desktop shell.
4. Click the same icon again at any time to return to the classic admin.

Optional: enable the AI Assistant

1. In Settings → Connectors, set up an AI provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google). Requires WordPress 7.0+.
2. In OpenStation, open OpenStation Preferences → Features and turn on AI assistant (it's off by default).
3. Press Cmd+K (or Ctrl+K) anywhere in OpenStation to open the AI assistant.

1.1.8

• Files: add uploaded files to the Media Library, and start a post or page from an image
• Add minimize and restore dock animations.
• Fix native app windows restoring the wrong saved instance
• Fix Native Users tables action icons visibility
• Add optimistic Trash updates and Explorer previews
• Redesign native Plugins, Posts, Pages, and Users workspaces
• Multisite: an OpenStation network of separate installs, with one switcher on every one
• Add the data-model page and unbreak the wiki sync
• Network: log in on arrival, mark external sites, and keep the switcher live
• Harden stored-file cleanup and make presence updates atomic
• Network: opt-in through an extended option, off by default
• Fix agent request timeouts and stale Recycle Bin contents
• Make preloading and shared cache opt-out Extended options
• Post Stats: draw the chart chrome in tokens instead of hardcoded black
• Preserve preferences on theme switch
• Os-text-field: add hide-label so a compact field can have a name without a visible label
• Widgets: raise the frame's chrome buttons to the 24px target-size floor
• AI Copilot: keep password-protected posts out of the search abilities
• Agents: seal password-protected posts in the get-post ability
• AI Copilot: gate comment search on parent-post readability
• My WordPress: scope the term-stats endpoint to posts the caller may read
• AI Copilot: authorize the model-named entity id before building the entity card
• My WordPress: gate the comment dossier on the window capability and parent-post readability

1.1.7

• Files: paint a dropped folder's tile as soon as it exists
• Shell: keep third-party scripts out of os-* fields and fixed panels out of the dynamic bar
• Files: drop the marching-ants frame from the wallpaper drop highlight
• WP Explorer: hover card off, preview pane only when open; Note Pad: drop the Public checkbox and Pin button
• Admin bar: keep items the bar's height; shell starts below the bar's measured edge

1.1.6

• Fix: Script loading: read the concat blob's handle list, so a lazily-loaded package stops replacing wp.hooks
• Fix: Shell boot: a target is one-shot and must be a real page, so a reload stops opening an empty window
• Add close all windows keybinds.
• Multisite: support the network admin, and scope desktops per site
• App Framework — a window in one PHP file (.osx.php + optional .os.ts), Code Blue & WP Explorer rebuilt on it
• App Framework DX: warn on the silent footguns, trace dispatches, open client views to third parties
• Trash: the Recycle Bin rebuilt on the App Framework — 659 lines against 1,869, the frozen id claimed, the legacy window deleted whole
• Station Home: the native Dashboard rebuilt on the App Framework — 931 lines against 1,323, no client script, the legacy window deleted whole
• WP Explorer: a list view — ids, slugs, dates and counts in sortable columns, remembered per user
• OpenStation Preferences: the settings window rebuilt on the App Framework — 4,858 lines against 7,136, the panel bundle deleted whole
• WooCommerce orders open on new window
• Multisite: drop deleted sites' tables, Core parity for site admins, per-site PWA, and a multisite CI job
• [Proposal] Workspaces — desktops that know what they're for
• Fix portal redirect: leave sub-resource fetches alone, so Jetpack's admin-bar sparkline renders
• Multisite: Site Spaces — another admin opens on its own desktop
• App Framework: find an app's client bundle without its TypeScript source, so packaged installs open client-view apps
• Code Blue: read the error without resizing, and a read-only skill that investigates it
• Drafts: name a draft's window after the draft, not the whole row
• Mobile: the phone layer — wp.os.mode, full-screen apps, switcher, tab bar
• Mobile: one desk on a phone — fold every desktop, switch workspaces off
• Mobile: fit the installed app to a phone — display stamp, no zoom, anchored tab bar
• Mobile: the native apps on a phone — one tap, one pane, pinch, and a self-updating PWA
• PWA: the shell never reloads itself — a waiting worker, a build stamp, and a Reload the user takes
• Chromeless: fix in-page title actions a plugin has grouped
• Drafts: fix the row's interaction states and name its actions
• App icons: full-bleed tiles, three purposes, and an apple-touch-icon
• Mobile: the list windows as cards, a bin that looks full, Explorer's item as a page
• Apps: Posts, Pages, Users, User Edit, Plugins and Comments become App Framework apps
• Mio: the inner line the artwork always had
• Preserve rapid extended options saves
• Multisite: every site is its own OpenStation, with a site switcher in overview

1.1.5

• Add OpenStation Beta: install builds from PR branches, trunk, or stable
• Pin every action to a commit SHA, prune closed PRs' zips from ci-artifacts
• Shell screen: boot the desktop from its own admin page instead of riding on the Dashboard
• Register --wp-admin-theme-color so chromeless documents never compute it to transparent
• Sync active Post/Page tab when navigating to Add Post from the Dock
• Attribute columns save to active window id
• Hotfix: a dock flyout holds a rail out, it never summons a parked one
• Revisions: open the revision browser in its own window
• Two low-contrast fixes in native windows: the shell document leaves quirks mode, and a neutral crumb stops pinning its paint inline
• Window channels: one set of books, so a window can leave its loading overlay
• Command palette: a harvested command that throws says so, instead of nothing at all
• Widgets: declare the card's token contract, so a widget's muted text stops landing at 3.81:1
• In-window navigation: ask before painting, so a cancelled "Leave site?" stops stranding the window

1.1.4

• Tooling: a deterministic boot-cost measurement for the shell document
• Native-window script data ships once per handle, not once per window (boot document −8.9%)
• The boot config ships references, not copies (boot document −12.8%)
• The shell-bundle diet — five features leave desktop.min.js (−21% vs the v1.1.3 release)
• Tooling: mirror docs/ into the GitHub wiki on every trunk push
• Purge pre-1.0 history and reconcile every page with the code
• Agents: give the cast faces, and rebuild create as a guided flow
• Shared admin-asset cache + hover window prewarming (opt-in)
• The shell asks the service worker for a screen before you click it
• Fix: Sub-pages within main page are not shown in dock menu
• Fix: Tile icons in the wallpaper can't display correctly some characters
• Windows stop paying for a command palette they never show
• The command palette stops costing every window and every boot
• Sync layout and status on settings rollback
• Decode HTML entities in Corkboard titles.
• A window stops building the admin bar it never draws
• Perf regression sweep: every finding, fixed
• Show a loader in place for every lazy-loaded surface
• Corkboard: keep a sparse board centred and explained
• The shell stops bouncing /wp-admin/ through the portal
• Trash: Hide the list chrome while the bin is empty
• Status ring: report classic form saves, and stop reporting reads
• Dynamic dock: auto-hide behavior setting, and one shared work area so windows, widgets, icons and graphs stay clear of the dock
• Adding Nuria as a contributor

1.1.3

• Refresh file associations when openers change
• Add Code Blue, the error-log reader app
• Station Home: stop claiming Dashboard subpages
• Add MailPoet compatiblity
• Station Home: make it opt-in via OS Settings → Features
• Components: the missing-import demo shows the code it talks about
• Desktop icons: one reading order per canvas, and a bounded scan
• Trash: localize config before the lazy payload harvest
• Corkboard: disc nodes by default, pins one row away
• Unfocus effects: split view is not "behind"
• Menu-refresh probe: attach script data before the payload harvest
• Windows: companion stylesheets, and the Woo CSS stops riding every page
• Plugin icons still missing
• Defer every window stylesheet to first open; fix shared-bundle configs; real theming tokens in Users/Profile
• Virtual desktops: rename in place, and four overview fixes
• Defer the command palette's Gutenberg runtime to first ⌘K

1.1.2

• Window: the open-animation deadline must not outlive its window
• Update notice: show the vinyl card when the release post lands late
• Add native Station Home dashboard
• Explorer: better third party apps integration
• Icons: adopt @wordpress/icons and draw the shell from one set
• Files: a drag out of the Media Library lands on the desktop
• Preserve and forward select host aria-label
• Navigation: one model decides where every menu, app and control lives
• Take the shell off the editor's typing path
• Widgets: reveal the add button on hover and snap floating widgets to a grid
• Appearance → Editor: the window's tab strip goes dark once the site editor loads
• Replace About scene with RSS-powered journal
• Tests: End the About CSS slice at the next section, not a named one
• Dock: keep off-site admin menus out, and put the wp-admin originals back

1.1.1

• My WordPress: let the entity hover card follow the desktop theme
• Expose and sync status ribbons setting
• Load window, wallpaper and widget bundles on demand
• Components: add , and
• Windows: guard focus(), unstick the opening class, add child windows
• Files: make the conflict toast's "View folder" actually open the folder
• Notch: place it behind the windows
• Update the wp.org screenshots for the current shell
• Windows: make Reload a common action for native windows too
• Themes: answer every palette literal in the Legacy snapshot
• Settings: open the Custom accent's colour wheel on its own swatch
• Components: a dark dialog owns its surfaces, not just its text
• Redesign the WordPress Themes workspace
• Hide iridescence slider when effect is off
• Hide wobble sliders when effect is off

1.1.0

• Consolidate navigation into a single dock
• Notes: Merge the sticky-notes into pinned notes
• Confirm dialog: route Enter to the focused button, trap and restore focus
• Posts window: Pluralize the bulk-action confirm text
• Windows: Fix the accessibility semantics of controls, tabs and loading
• Make the active window tab a frosted plate that slides
• A11y: keep actionable toasts alive while attended, trap focus in first-run dialogs
• Add the missing Domain Path header
• AI: Internationalize the assistant overlay
• Dashboard: Stop the welcome panel dismiss opening a stray window
• Shell: exit OpenStation when the plugin stops being active
• AI: Drop the SSE transport and answer over a single request
• Activity indicator: settle on the response, not on the promise
• Native windows: Remove the first-open intro modals
• Woo relations: a refund is not a purchase; user tiles: carry their key
• Settings: Redesign of this panel and regrouping
• Refresh folder share action on settings save
• Fixes: silent settings loss, folder-sharing visibility, and wallpaper shortcuts
• Dock: Move the admin bar's jobs into the dock and a notch
• Trash: Drop the desktop icon, and let a placeable tile choose its rail

1.0.1

• AI: the assistant answers over a single request again; live progress streaming is gone
• Tile contrast, comments-window styling, Overview clicks, and preview refreshes
• Always show the Agents section in WP Explorer
• Windows: Preserve fullscreen state after leaving Overview
• Decode HTML entities in plugin install toast
• Settle a pending Overview exit before re-entering
• AI: surface an empty final answer as an error instead of a silent success
• Experimental: Set OpenStation windows free into real OS windows (Electron adapter)

1.0.0

• Desktop Mode is now OpenStation — new name, new look, same plugin. Settings, files, sessions and desktop layouts carry over untouched.
• The site folder is now WP Explorer, and OS Settings is now OpenStation Preferences.
• A new palette and typography, with four wallpapers: Galaxy (the new default), Space, Holomesh and Pulsemesh.
• Desktop Mode (Legacy) — a built-in desktop theme that puts the previous look back in one click, WordPress blue included.
• Mio — a soft-body desk companion that drifts across the wallpaper and gets pushed around by your windows. Off by default; turn it on from the dock.
• Holographic controls, a new Switch component, and a searchable Components tab in OpenStation Preferences.
• Multi-select everywhere: click, Ctrl-click, Shift-click, marquee and Cmd+A, with WordPress's own bulk actions and multi-item drag.
• Custom post types now appear in WP Explorer, grouped by the plugin or theme that registered them.
• Post tiles show their featured image instead of a generic icon.
• WooCommerce — Orders, Products, Coupons and Customers as browsable folders, with stock and sale ribbons, customer lifetime spend, and coupon redemption views.
• The editor's preview companion follows your typing in the classic editor too, and opens straight away instead of waiting on a save.
• Many fixes: Media Library uploads, context menus near the screen edge, Quick Edit after list refreshes, revisions opening in-window, window state across refreshes.
• The portal URL moved from /desktop-mode/ to /openstation/. Reinstall the app if you added OpenStation to your home screen.
• For plugin authors: wp.desktop is now wp.os, <wpd-*> components are <os-*>, PHP functions and hooks use the openstation_ prefix, and activity channels moved to os/<event>. Stored data — options, meta, custom tables, REST namespaces and the WordPress.org slug — is unchanged.

0.9.8

• Desktop Themes — uploadable ZIP theme system
• Drafts widget with an AI writing assistant, window corner-radius setting, live split-view editor preview
• AI Agents framework: agents as WordPress users, abilities runner, chat with persisted conversations
• Redesigned two-pane Comments window, Aero Peek dock previews, window reveal animations
• Security: closed privilege-escalation and session-bypass paths; strict structured-output schemas at the provider boundary
• Many smaller fixes and polish Earlier releases are on the GitHub releases page.